This sounds like a great proposal, and those 50-seat aircraft are the backbone of the mountain communities I grew up around in the PNW. Is there any loss in effectiveness in using standard atmospheric air (thanks to N2 and other non-oxygen components of air)? What do you do with the resultant H2O when the reaction is complete?
Yeah using standard air gives you a performance hit - but it is preferred to carrying around pure oxygen from a weight standpoint. We just exhaust the H20 from the aircraft. There are other things you can do, such as condense and capture, but everything comes with a performance hit that we don't think is worth it.
> Is there any loss in effectiveness in using standard atmospheric air
> What do you do with the resultant H2O
I can't imagine why an aircraft would ever want to carry its own oxygen supply, and capture the byproduct. Oxygen is heavy. Are you thinking of a spacecraft?
More specifically, hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, whereas oxygen has an atomic weight of 16. For producing H20, that means you would have to carry 8x your hydrogen's weight in oxygen, if you don't use atmospheric oxygen.
Lowering the sails will be critical to safe operation in bad weather. The deployment process will be easily reversible, so that within a few minutes you can go from full sail to fully stowed (or any place in between), likely with emergency settings to bring the sail down faster. We don't want to limit the weather a ship would sail in without diversion, but instead just make use of reasonable winds when they are present. We certainly will want to make future software for route planning assistance, but our first step will not require the ship to change course or speed to see benefits of the sails. It's certainly worth it over all to follow the wind, but for ease of adoption that can come later.
From our early investigations, many cargo ships already maintain sufficient moveable ballast (ie: water tanks) in order to handle dock operations, that they can also handle the roll moment from the sails. Maintenance is on our mind too. The possibility with a containerized solution is as easy as "ship it back to the manufacturer by putting a shipping label on it" for maintenance, and we can make sure to have spares dockside for our customers while their main device is being serviced.
Using ballast in port operations is significantly different then using ballast while sailing especially for offsetting a non static moment.
Container vessels are designed to sail at a very specific draught. The bulbous bows on most container vessels are fine tuned hydrodynamic shapes that impact ths wave patterns that ships generate. Sailing at a different draught because you're adding ballast will greatly decrease fuel efficiency. Additionally any added draught also increases the amount of water you have to displace, so again decreasing fuel efficiency.
Further more, I highly doubt regulations would permiss this. I'd have to dive in IMO statues to verify, but imagine because of any event the rolling moment from the sails decreases in a short amount of time. Now the vessel has the same instability that you initially tried to offset, just caused by your own ballast.
I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are on these issues. Non the less, very interesting ideas
Our current prototype is a 1/50 bench model using off-the-shelf tape measures. We're working on rapidly scaling that up to test on our Lido-14. I'm sure others will try to copy the concept, but as the comments have shown there will be quite a few engineering difficulties getting this from a bench prototype to production. As a startup rather than a legacy company, we are well situated to take on that difficult engineering task, whereas a larger company may shy away from it. We'd of course be happy to work with them to get this on a ship and de-risk the rest of the operations!
I totally agree that route optimization takes on a whole different dimension now! For our early models and numbers, we're just benchmarking no change in route of speed, to really highlight the baseline benefits of sails. However, there are tremendous knock-on effects that would give you an advantage to follow the wind. We can make use of not only improved forecasting, but better satellite weather data and connectivity to ships to provide updates in real time. Altogether, there will be a lot of performance on the table that ships can take advantage of in the future.
Very cool product. Routes are indeed a fascinating topic. I wonder what a fully re-worked routing would do for this technology. Obviously not a 0 to 1 problem, but might be worthy demonstrating what a re-worked route plan could do. For hundreds of years, trade by sea was dictated by wind patterns. Today, it no longer is - but imagine what would be possible if routes took advantage of trade winds using this technology.
I like the deeper sheath idea, but we moved away from that early on for a few reasons. A major one is cargo-handling, because you rapidly hit limits on how high the cranes can lift containers away from the deck. They can't start moving sideways until the entire container is free and clear, and if your container is too tall you may not even clear the stack before the crane reaches its upper limit. From a load management perspective, if you have the choice to go taller or wider, it's generally better to go wider. This also plays into the idea of using tape-spring rollers to store the sail material - it lends itself to being wider, rather than narrower. You can look in a few of our other comments below for more of a description, but yes, we plan to have load spreaders to reduce the compression load on any one stack, and tethers deployed to the main deck to provide additional tension restraints.
This is definitely a place where we think we can leverage modern automation processes. No need to add additional crew to manage the rigging, and the system should be able to manage itself safely.
While a container ship doesn't have a keel per-se, it does have about 200m of flat plate length sticking into the water. At small angles, that flat plate can actually have a decent lift to drag ratio. Historic sailing vessels also made do without a modern wing-keel, so our current plan is that the container ship can crab into the wind by less than a degree to produce all of the side force required to maintain a steady course.
Yeah a classic keel is not needed for bigger vessels as long as GM is low enough. One big difference between sail ships and modern ones is the increased air draft which effects the lift to drag ratio. Looking at your answers so far, I assume you've considered this already.
Yes, I can't say that we have absolutely everything figured out so far, but we have a decently complete model. Windage, changes to draught, and GM are already factored into our models at the root level, and while we may need to still tweak things we aren't waiting to be surprised by their effects.
