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GW GroundGen for AWECS FairIP offer
Wingmill Thicket-
Toward Wayne German's "Vertical Blinds"
| The linked image is the latest KiteLab Group gigawatt-scale
groundgen scheme. Each airbeam battened membrane wingmill could be 300 m
long & deliver about 50 MW in a Force-5 breeze. Six of them as a cell are
300 MW with a max altitude of about 5000 ft. ASL. The lifter trains could
be GigaFlys as shown. Three cells or more is gigawatt scale.
Image
in JPG
Image in
PDF The six wingmills fire in synchronous sequence by being linked, tuned, & staged downwind/crosswind diagonally to drive a massive crankshaft well in the class of supership machinery (~50 MW). The cells orient to wind-veering by a compass-belay sequence in an anchor circle. Trim lines forestall the urgency to belay. The center power station is a turret. A unitized worker/pilot can supervise about 10 MW of AWEC 7/24 capacity on an averaged basis, so a crew of about one hundred could operate a gigawatt plant at high capacity. It would truly be like sailing tall-ships in the sky, a golden age as cheap reliable auto-flygens & fusion power slowly mature. All operations have long proven analogs in industry well within normal skilled labor capabilities. There would be suitable handling machinery & operators would face little hazard. Runaway kites will be a very rare as everything is either two lines or has a passive kill line as a deadman switch. One cool detail is an auxiliary "Whiskey-Line" that can pull the entire rig to windward as it is flown higher. Thus the wing mils are always canted upwind to provide self-lift with high power or reversibly slacked to kill the oscillation & drag the rig lower to pause or douse. Sequential wingmill firing is working well in simple experiments. I'll keep working on the written description, but the attached image shows clockwise from top-left a side, front, 3/4 concept, & plan view. Please create a link to the image & this note can be forwarded to the forum. Thanks to Wayne German for inspiration & feedback on this sort of "flying thicket" concept which maximizes safety & energy extraction from minimal airspace at lowest capital cost. ~~ Dave Santos KiteLab Group FairIP/CoopIP |
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