Hi JoeF,

I am very glad to see the results of your mining the literature.

Well, I have spent several years studying the literature of DSing, among others, the papers of Mark Drella, Kiceniuk Barnes, Sachs and a long line of other authors. I think my patent application contains enough citations from the literature to evaluate the state of the art. Therefore it wasn't  a surprise for me that a downward gustes are also useful for gaining energy with DS:

"Vector diagram of dynamic soaring: showing how a glider can get energy from a downward gust" by Taras Kiceniuk--an illustration for the above article "

But I know, it is not a simple thing to decide where to begin? I would propose the following site:

DSing step by step  

You willl find here a very simple though experiment, calculating a full DSing cycle step by step, together with clear explanations.

Returning to your links, it was a very large surprise for me that renowned members of the community (do not forget we are talking about the AWES !) have essential difficulties with understanding dynamic soaring. The following quotes are more than enough to prove this:  (Without mentioning any names)

"raise the question "once the tether is abandoned, then what besides wind gradient and gravity serves to effectively hold this flying device into the "teeth of wind"?" My short comment: apart from wind gradient and gravity, only inertial mass is needed... and NOTHING  ELSE (apart from  the necessary knowledge).

try harvesting energy in a uniform 200 kt jet stream with this scheme…..all you end up doing is being swept across the countryside)
My comment: I will NOT try it. I'd like to bring this comment to Doug's attention. This test would be totally pointless. DSing isn't possible in uniform wind. One has to know not only WHAT TO DO, but also WHAT NOT TO DO. But even if you meant 200kt wind gradients, I will not do this experiment, but for the opposite reason: for those skilled in the art it is obvious that it works. (by the way, the unit of wind gradient is not kt but kt/m or kt/foot or inverse seconds, 1/s )

My intuitive assessment of tetherless (ie. non-externally-equilibrated wind force) energy harvesting envisions that reverse-effective forces (ie. d'Alambert forces) are all you have at your disposal to "stand your ground against the wind" (ie. in order to force relative wind to persist at useful levels

• http://www.dearmanengine.com/cms/liquid-air/
• Run small demonstrator engine
• Run handy workbench scale engine
• Run a car
• http://www.dearmanengine.com/cms/applications/    mentions the following: 
• forklifts
• golf carts
• tools
• bikes
• trucks
• buses
• underground mining equipment
• waterways material handling machines
• port machinery
• Mentioned in a post in AWES group:  creating ballast for a sailplane or hang glider. Then when not wanting the ballast consider using the gasification for powering the glider or sailplane or some instrument or process on board. 
• Look for applications of LOX      ?
• Look for applications for liquid nitrogen
• Look for applications for argon gas
• Drive turbines to make electricity for small or large loads.   See the thousands of applications for electricity. 
• ?

 This topic regards LTA untethered receiving stations (LTAUTRS). Thanks to the nudges from DBMurr!      We have elsewhere already some start on ground-based receiving stations (GBRS); and, of course, ground-based receiving stations may or may not coordinate with airborne LTA receiving stations, depending on niche system design.  

DMurr directed some attention to a researcher that has made some progress on vacuum balloons:: 

Microfabricating the First-Ever Lighter-Than-Air Solid Structure by Dr. Gavrilin

awec2013_poster_v7_Dobos.pdf

• Group: Friends of DG's Flying Wind Power Plant
• Subject: AWEC2013

Dear Friends,

Please find my poster presented at the AWEC2013 Airborne Wind Energy Conference in Berlin at the following link: http://uploadingit.com/file/ gcrzgrhfskkngxlz/IFO_awec2013_ poster_Dobos.pdf . The website of the conference: www.awec2013.de. The „Book of Abstracts” can be downloaded from: http://www.awec2013.de/index. php?page=speaker#abstracts . (for our IFO, see: p. 62.)

It was very interesting to see that even though several types of airborne devices are proposed to harvest energy from high altitude winds, all have a common feature, namely the tether, that connects the device to a ground station. While listening to the presentations and reading the abstracts, my father comes to mind. He was a handyman, and was always tinkering with something. He could have become a phenomenal engineer, had his circumstances made it possible. He has, as fathers usually do, built kites of several types for me. I enjoyed playing around with kites, and I like to see them fly even today., e.g.: at

http://vimeo.com/74443367/ download?t=1381616303&v= 189628928&s= f9fe1bd0f9a710f0abe21b387c07d4 df 

But I remember very clearly that we always had difficulties with the tether. Altogether, we spent much more time with the tether than with all the other parts of the kite or with flying it. This is probably the origin of my aversion to the tether. Of course, one can say that these were problems of a toy. They would be right. But probably, the central task of even today's kites is the construction of tethering and related issues. It was interesting to see that a lot of presentations at the conference also dealt with these problems. Though the scientific-industrial background seems to be significant and persuasive, the results are just starting to approach a desired technical standard and reliability. This is not only my guess, but also the opinion of experts: “Kite-power systems ... need an accurate control system ... to cover the main dynamic behavior of all system components: the kite, the tether and the ground station. To the best knowledge of the authors, no system model was published until now that covers the dynamics of all three system components.” (see: Dynamic Kite-Power System Modeling. Uwe Fechner, Rolf van der Vlugt, Roland Schmehl, Delft University of Technology, Book of Abstracts p. 42.)

In comparison to the sophisticated glider/UAV/drone constructions and their guidance systems of today, it seems that these untethered autonomous devices have an advantage of several years in respect to kites. I am convinced even more than I was before the conference that untethered flying devices like our IFOs will be the winners in this race of technologies. But there are also several other reasons for why I think so.* First of all, our IFOs are not tethered to the ground and therefore their activity radius isn’t restricted by the length of the tether. IFOs need not wait for good winds, they can follow them. This way, one of the important drawbacks of other wind power harvesting devices, namely the low capacity factor, caused by the fluctuation of the winds can be eliminated. This action alone results in duplication of the harvested energy.

Another key topic of the conference was energy storage.

Prof. Chul Park's liquid hydrogen producing parafoil-pulled ships represent a very interesting complex approach to the problems (Book of Abstracts p.33.) Since our posters were second neighbors, we have met up right at the beginning of the conference, and we had interesting discussions about economy, cryotechnology and ways of energy storage. Later on, he introduced me to Prof. Michael Sterner, who proposes to convert the produced hydrogen to methane, “which is fully compatible with today's natural gas infrastructure.” (Book of Abstracts p. 34.) 

To be continued.

Gabor