Thanks Doug, yeah you showed me that
It's Kinda close to the later drawings like 103, a sort of downwind version of a darius...
But I was thinking of aligning kites in complementary array up the outsides, such that the kites on the outsides pull tension in the internals, allowing the kites to extend out and sweep a wider radius about the axis. Also your drawings don't indicate the advantages of fluting the system to a larger axial radius as you rise away from the generator. . . more cross wind grunting.

Lofting a cone shape does require a lot of lofting, but with the scope of some of the tri mountain configurations in these islands it would be a sinch. low level but a huge start.

Again ... and I know this will bring arguments, there is merit in transmitting torque pushing down to the ground through a spiralling shape. I had some scraps of paper mentioning engineering qualifications under a massive pile paper, Probably in the recycling.

As for weather, in the UK, we're obsessed, Western Isles it's in our blood, I can judge to within 10 seconds when to get my washing in. Some of those sheets can really whip you as a kid. Hard lessons.

The cycles of cold, wet, dry energy variance we get from the sun are going to be ever more available to read on whatever frequency they interact... today's news was not a lot of hot phlogiston

University of Oxford study ties Winter Weather with Solar Variability

last week

Advances from ASCAT through esa SMOS and new NASA aquarius satellites bringing sea conditions into weather predictions.

Don't even start to try dismiss peer reviews of thousands of scientifically documented papers. It's my main motivation in AWE.

Other than finding a way to stop wasting oils by turning them temporarily into heat. aaarrrrggghh!!!!

You may now consider my spleen vented. If only I'd had a kite in front of it.

1 MW-h = $40 (at 4 cents/kWh)
Having a GE 1.5 MW turbine at a 33% capacity factor site is like having a $40/hr worker, putting in his 8 hours a day, and giving you the paycheck.
If you needed an actual worker, potentially 24 hours a day to babysit this one turbine, the economics would go out the window.
That's why they have windfarms, since it's a more efficient use of peoples' time and equipment to babysit several machines together.
Yes autonomous operation, or something close to it, will most likely be needed to achieve economic viability.

Why didn't anyone argue with this nonsense?...

To workers on free-flight AWECS:  paragliders, that is,  two-kite systems

Celebrate Realie and Racie,
a couple in fugitive flight
setting the scene for a new aviation method.

Here is something from  February 22, 1895:
http://www.energykitesystems.net/WPGA/History/RealieAndRacie.jpg  showing here made possible by World ParaGliding Association researching Woglom's parakites:

Gosh That really is a blue shift Darin.

I've been looking up Read Effect, Can't find it anywhere on-line.
Hope it's not named after one of my family. That'd be really embarrassing. Loads of RAF history there.

My system description was purely in the realms of classical mechanics. A bit of cloth getting dragged around pulling a spring with it.

The minutia of what happens to light, as it bends passing through media, will certainly affect the photos I'll take, of the toys I have bought. I will be sure to adjust correctly for chromatic aberration.

The kids have already tried to pinch my trampoline.
I'm investigating sites for suspending it today.

Spiralling is probably the UK spelling. To be honest the simplest computer has always been able to spell better than me. I very rarely win pedantry arguments. My in-laws love that stuff though.

Thanks again for the friendly, open and revealing advice as always.

Rod Read
I'll try and post detail on my spinning disk thingey as it progresses

Oh yeah solar. Shield your eyes: a beam of reality is illuminating the dust in the air! (Do I see some phlogiston?)

If you mounted solar on your kite, and left in stretched out in your back yard, you would of course come out far ahead of any AWE system demonstrated thusfar.

I was surprised that one of my favorite off-grid-living (battery shed) wind energy friends, who works at windfarms, living in the midst of big turbines, with GE 1.5's just outside his backyard (which he does not like - NIMBY), on a hill (so you KNOW he's "got wind"), started cursing small wind turbines a couple years ago. He stopped running his turbine, saying how trouble-free solar is: set it and forget it. Also no noise.
And his turbine was one of the most reliable and quiet I knew of!

Last I heard, one main problem with solar now is, even if the panels were free, the support structures are still expensive enough that the numbers won't pencil out without subsidies (unless you live off-grid whereby electricity defines its own value). So the reality is, even if someone is handing you free power and you have to even lift a finger to support it, the power company can still get you electricity cheaper!

I know a certified welder who makes well over $30/hr fabricating support structures for solar. I guess it's pay him, or pay the power company. Then there's the cost of the wiring and especially the expensive grid-tie inverter, which also may develop problems over time...

Still I can tell you that with a 10 kW wind turbine here, we pay essentially no electric bill, and we leave lights on 24/7. However it was installed only with subsidies, and was worn out before its 5-year warranty expired. When I bought the place, the $67,000 turbine had reached the end of its useful life, was shaking itself apart, and luckily I noticed 2 months before the warranty expired.

When they finally came to repair it months later (after several end-of-year subsidy-deadline installations around town), they accidentally dropped it 100 feet and it smashed. Luckily they had another used turbine on a trailer and swapped it out. So it runs again now, but it would seem only a matter of time before this one too needs a major rebuild, costing thousands of dollars starting with hiring a crane to bring it down, and a crew of people to work on it, and major, expensive parts.

The reality is, even just a grid-tie inverter (that may fail) is so expensive that without subsidies, adding in the cost of the tower, cables, switches, etc., if the turbine were free, it would be a wobbler at best.

Gotta make it cheap, reliable, and trouble-free!
:)
Doug S.

Brainstorm to stop Mega-Array Kite 

Deflation of essential inflated spars.  Inflated parts are very good at limiting loads, and then recovering elastically.  We can also use members with a section like a tape measure, which can be stiff in one direction, fail catastrophically on overload, and still recover 100% when the load is entirely removed.  Pairs of such structures can be stiff in two directions.

Substitute the word "flogiston" for "kite".
:)

Re: regulating air beams.  You may have noticed that when you blow up a party balloon, the resistance is highest initially.   Then, what surgeons call an aneurism appears, and the inflation pressure goes down for a long period.  This effect might be used to trip small components into collapse with automatic recovery, but it is probably sufficient to just keep a long beam at a constant internal pressure.  Most large inflated structures have constant air supplies in the expectation of minor leaks, or at least permeability.   It is probably smart to use a special material where they are most likely to buckle, to take repeated  folding.

Santos' Tri-Tether intimated here?

The 1919 mooring method is cousin?

--- In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, dave santos <santos137@...
***I must be slipping! How could I misspell kite? er um I mean Phlogiston? Hello it is a Greek concept: PH! Good call Dave S.!

***I guess that IS like misspelling Flogiston - 4 miles vs 6 miles, sorry Dave I saw your machine up there in my telescope and mis-under-estimated the altitude! :)

Even spellcheck says I misspelled flogiston, and Superturbine!

*** Well the fastest way really is to have a 70 mph wind, as we did here the other day. We lost some concrete roof tiles. You had to lean into it to walk. The steel pole holding up a SuperTwin(TM) bent over 20 degrees (the SuperTwin(TM) itself was still operating and is fine - no damage, re-installed yesterday).

***The Firefly(TM), a 2-rotor downwind machine, exploded in a (100% predicted) failure mode, that nobody (including (especially?) the above 4-letter tagging crews) knows about, having no experience running or even observing multi-rotor turbines. (They are too busy)

Maboomba!

(Maboomba is another invention of mine. An unknown word when I registered the domain maboomba.com a couple years ago, (3 hits on google) that today gets 130,000 hits when you google it. Who said I never invented anything useful? :)

Could maboomba be the 22nd century version of Phlogiston?

What IS Maboomba?

Ever get an e-mail offering 20 million dollars from a deceased uncle and they need someone they can trust, like you, to handle it? Maboomba!

:O... ... ... ... ... ... ...

This sounds good if you stop the HAWT during kite launch.  The wind speed directly behind a working turbine is much reduced.  A picture of the streamlines going past one looks like a wine glass with a thick stem.  

On Fri, 2011-10-14 at 13:28 -0700, dave santos wrote:
Don't let a false alarm spoil what was otherwise a good idea. The wind
picks up again very quickly behind a turbine. Even if the wind just
behind the nacelle is insufficient to launch the kite simply let out the
tether some more. As you let out the tether the wind will blow the kite
away from the turbine where the speed will be almost back to ambient. If
that is still not enough let out the tether even more and the kite will
drop below the turbine. If that is still not enough then the wind is too
weak to generate power anyway.

Another advantage of the idea is that it helps balance the nacelle.
Direct drive generators have advantages but it is difficult to put them
where they balance the mass of the turbine. This puts an uneven load on
the yaw bearings. The turbine and generator on one side of the nacelle
can be well balanced by the AWE system on the other side.

Robert.

That sounds interesting, if possibly a bit gusty.  I think I'd rather try a small, light pilot kite that would self-trim to avoid overloading itself when the wind picked up.   In proposing a two kite system, I was expecting to eliminate the short recovery phases for a steady power output.  Perhaps a better use of material would be three kites or more kites, with only one being recovered at a time.  

When an extant tower is being decommissioned, the AWE option might fit. When an extant tower is being repaired, the AWE option might fit. Cables between towers in a wind farm might hold cross-winding sails or karts driven by kites.  Cables  between towers might hold multiple rotors driving torque casing.  ? 

"Market status report, August 2011 by GL Garrad Hassan ...The report favors offshore..." (Joe Faust).

According to GH onshore AWECS implementation is a problem for public acceptance in regard to the safety with power lines.

For a 100 MW scale installation comprising tethers of 1.5 km the ground area would be materialized with a disk of more than 3 km diameter.

So it would be interesting to make a map of possible implementations onshore in uninhabited areas of some km².

In France I see only the "plateau du Larzac",in Corsican the "désert des Agriates",or above some forests.

PierreB

http://flygenkite.com  

 

DaveS,

Yes,maximizing airspace is a main point for ROI.

Concerning Makani,their prototype have a high ratio L/D allowing a high swept area (and probably a limit of useful wind speed due to the tip speed of turbine,but it is another question).Its high speed allows a rotation within the same time than for a conventional rotor with the same diameter than the diameter of the wing loop.So it looks the space in the ring is maximized.Nethertheless the space within the ring is not tapped*.

Concerning schemes including arrays of kites on one main line,automatic launching and recovering are too difficult.The scheme single-wing-single-station is by far better:it is easier to implement by first a single unity before a kite-farm which space maximization will be identical to an array of kites.

I have made a conversion from OrthoKiteBunch (see http://www.worldenergy.org/documents/congresspapers/155.pdf  within the first presentation of HAWE and AWECS at a World Energy Congress in Issue 2.5 - World Energy Council Montreal 2010) towards a reel-out/in method.But above all last days I experimented another flight configuration allowing a further kite-farm where maximization of the space is 3 tor 4 times the maximization of space according to known schemas of kite-farms according to reel-out/in method or flygen method where the space should be maximized,both with kites flying crosswind.Details are not on my website http://flygenkite.com because for this scheme we work in stealth mode.However FlygenKite is focused on both macro-energy and micro-energy,hoping a synergy for the acceleration of the commercial reality of macro-energy.So http://flygenkite.com shows a manual flown kite energy for lighting in the field of model making.The price sale of the kit energy will be something like 120 $.In case of success this toy,as educational game,can make a contribution helping for a better knowledge of high-scale projects in AWECS.

Concerning Makani again,a maximization* of the space should be quite possible with a kite-farm management where the loop of every wing would have a different diameter,where the addition of them produces a disk hollowed out only in the center;of course the size of wings should be adapted to their respective paths.

Note:the Forum should be a mean to accelerate a better knowledge of AWECS,comprising Makani.Too much systematic critics put off credibility not (only_?_) for the object but for whom criticizes;particulary Makani looks to make a serious project where all details are thought,where problems must be put in balance with problems posed by other schemes.

PierreB (France,excuses for my heavy language)
http://flygenkite.com

Another toy very worthy of consideration is the pop up tunnel.
It is a fantastic means of torque transfer for a kite system.

http://www.elc.co.uk/Pop-Up-Tunnel-and-Tents/122605,default,pd.html

Please try for yourself...I'll post a video later for those of you without immediate access to one.

Stand on one end on the floor. With the spring coming up clockwise. Now try to twist the top ring clockwise. What you observe is not only that the system becomes rigid very quickly as it tries to shrink ...
but it also creates a smooth indented corkscrewing deformation of it's skin...

Exactly the kind of complementary structure you want fixed either down or upwind to an axially fixed rotating ring of kites.

A spinnaker also works as a top cover shroud for a turbine string run through funnel shaped valleys.

It could even double as a brake system if pulled down.

not a very high altitude design but functional and cheap none the less.

There are so many wee gullies, cliffs, stacks, general areas of geological variability around this island.
I'm planning to build my first prototype one of these above the shore 100m from the house where I grew up.

Learnt some tough lessons in trusting ropes on those cliffs.
Learnt some tough lessons in not trusting wind and waves there too.

must post the video I took earlier today of myself and oldset son Fin. Playing on the trampoline whilst flying a kite with one of it's ends pegged to the washing line.
Work doesn't have to be too grueling.

Often wondered why city skyscraper towers don't have stabilizing cooperative tied web-work between them... but I'm not a city boy.

Triangulating wires and Doug's grids between buildings which naturally funnel wind, would provide potential emergency escape /general transport from one building to another.

The same benefits apply to organic form matching kites for landscape.
A seaborne tower beside a cliff, or vertical spinners slung from horizontal rings strung between cliffs,

Cross-bracing is mostly of interest during an earthquake.  It has not been used because all the buildings involved would have had to be designed for it or extensively renovated to be able to benefit, and each building is traditionally the esthetic province of a single designer, who wants his work to be distinctive.  

As a shaft, this would be improved by using three or four spiral members to help prevent collapse of the overall structure.  The upper limit is set by the need for the membrane in tension to form enough of a crease at the spirals to stabilize it from buckling. Anybody care to do the math?

U.S. Patent 6616402, others