Is it Normal That I'm Not frustrated?

Almost 3 years ago I described here the frustration of a 71 years kibbutz member in Israel without higher education, but with a very strong drive to invent.

Now I am older, but though none of my ideas have yet been actualized by me, I enjoy the situation where innovative ideas come to me, and I study by myself every piece of knowledge that can contribute toward the implementation of the idea.

And when I introduce this idea to scientists, they do their best to help me.

Fortunately I don't have the money that is needed to patent these ideas. I have seen too many patented ideas that were never realized in fact; it is just waste of money!

About 4 years ago I came up with an idea to make a use of wind energy in an unconventional way: To build a huge sail catamaran. A turbo generator will be mounted on the vessel and the turbine will be submerged in the sea's water. When the wind blows on the sail, it will drive the catamaran forward, and and will result in a relative water flow to the turbine which in turn will rotate and drive the generator.

Which use can done with the electricity that is generated in the midst of the ocean far away from the cost? The electric power can be use for electrolysis of the sea water and to produce hydrogen, which will be used as fuel for fuel cells or as fuel for I.C engines!

The reason that I preferr­ed a huge sail instead of using huge wind turbine was based on my faulty assumption that the energy that can be extracted from the wind on a turbine is only for the area of the turbine's blades, (only later I learned that the area is equal to the "disc" of the rotating turbine!) I thought that the sail's area will be about 3-4 larger than the turbine's disk. But even as I became familiar with the fact that a100 m' diameter turbine will have 7500 square meters ,which is about 75 % of a square 100m' sail. I preferred sail on a turbine , because stationary turbines mounted on a huge post are now very common, but people don't like to have them in close vicinity.

So not many of them can be placed on land, many turbines are posted off shore, which limits the total area that can be used! You can't place the turbine too far away from the shore, because the ocean is much deeper there, which would increase the cost of placing a turbine at that depth.

Another benefit of using a sail, is the fact, that increasing the turbine's blades is much more complex and expensive compared to enlarging a sail. We know that at a higher altitude the winds are stronger!

I introduced this idea to my partner, Professor Tanchum Weler and he thought it might be a good idea.

Tanchum enlisted another engineer, Yuval Yassur, to help us with the calculations.

At this time the global economic crisis erupted, and many ships were decommissioned. Tanchum and Yuval thought to use some old ship, probably a tanker, and to dismantle it and strip from it everything not absolutely necessary, and to put a huge sail on it.

I didn't much like this idea, because I thought that the ship's hull would be too heavy, and would lose much of the wind's power to overcome the hydrodynamic resistance due to its weight. But I'm not an engineer, so I trusted their calculations. But then Yuval's calculations showed that combining the old heavy ship's hull with a sail, was totally inefficient.

Meanwhile I continued to accumulate more information about this topic, I figured that I'm not the only person who came up with this idea, and I actually found out that in 1982 Robert Salomon from the USA patented such idea, and in 2007 an Israeli , Moshe Meller, patented that same idea, with some more variations added.

But most important of all was his vision: Meller thought about a huge fleet of thousands of such autonomous sail catamarans connected by radio to a satellite that would dispatch them to areas of the ocean where high winds are expected. And, of course, there would be a ship that will collect all the hydrogen and ship it to the land.

BUT then I discovered that the problem was much more complex! Separation of water to hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis is very inefficient, so this was the reason that this innovative idea was not implemented!

There is another hurdle: Hydrogen storage is quite problematic, for hydrogen is inflammable, and requires storage in high pressure containers. For this reason ,since three decades I read articles of discussions about this topic.

I became happy to read that Israeli scientist Prof.Dan Eliezer invented a system for hydrogen storage that uses glass beads; for this project was established a company headed by Moshe Stern, and this company C-En , was comprised of partners from Russia, Germany and Korea.

Today I read that they converted their system to glass capillaries and multi-capillary array rather than glass beads.

2 years ago I read that prof' Daniel Nocera from M.I.T developed a system for efficient electrolysis for hydrogen production,again I became very happy, and I was sure that shortly we can benefit from this idea; but last year I read that prof. Nocera signed an agreement with Tata in India for a 15 years research project for the development of this idea!

Last year I came up with an alternative idea: as far as I know, aluminum has the highest chemist energy potential by oxidation compared to other substances. For this reason I thought that there might be a way to use aluminum as fuel, the combustion = oxidation and because it's high energy density I thought to ship this aluminum oxide to the catamaran where it will be again separated to aluminum through electrolysis !

Another option I thought about, was to combine aluminum production from the Bauxite,through electrolysis, a process that requires lot of electricity,.

And as I continued to gather information I read about a team of Purdue University headed by Gerry Woodall, that succeeded to develop a system for efficient hydrogen production using aluminum gallium alloy.

The aluminum will react with the oxygen in the water, and release the hydrogen. The oxidated aluminum can be later separated by electrolysis.

I was really fascinated! Here is a beautiful system that will solve all the problems! But then I started to check on the implementation of it, and found nothing!

So some weeks ago I asked on "our" cr4 website if some one knew anything about this system. The answer was that it isn't practical! But I read that a company named GeneSys developed a system called RET, that enables efficient water separation by using radio radiation.

The company is contemplating producing the hydrogen on the spot (gas station!), but it will require electric power, so why not use it on the ship's board?! The hydrogen will then be transported on shore for automobile consumption, and stored by the technique developed by C-En.

What made me write this story was the fact that in my efforts to follow the topic, I learned last week that a team headed by Prof. Max Platzer from UC Davis had ­begun to promote the concept of sail boats to capture wind energy to produce hydrogen, and a team from South Wales university headed by Prof. Nesrin Kaligul Klijn is developing a better water turbine for this project, and a team from the Royal Institute in Stockholm joined them for a 9 months research project with funding by the European Union.,

Now to the end of my story - I have a question for you: Is it normal, that I don't feel any frustration that I am not involved (de facto!) in this project?

In fact, I feel a great deal of satisfaction, that I anticipated this idea, although I have no formal education. And to comfort myself, I adopt for this situation a saying of our ancient Jewish scholars: "The task of the honest is done by others". All we have to do now is to wait patiently for the day when a huge fleet of gigantic sail boats will be cruising the ocean...

I believe that the size of their sails will be about 500 by 500 meters, without any mast, only a blimp filled with helium will stretch the sail to all the height and there the winds will do their work.

Bottom line: We will not be dependent on oil any longer and there will be no more pollution of the atmosphere!