nifty ladder mill paper.

The Laddermill work in progress -

Bill gates on high altitude wind power

Bill Gates of all people has been making some intereasting incursions to the global engergy crisis [here]

Yes its a crazy idea but it should work

Odd week,
I've found a few patents which overlap quite a lot with what I'm thinking about, that was a bit of a down moment.

On the plus side I had a great meeting with Derek Taylor a lecturer from the OU who has been doing a broad range of eco projects and has done some fascinating work on using buildings to augment wind turbines. He definitely had his head on the right way and had some fantastic ideas to help push things on. His big suggestion was using a normal wind turbine during the proof of concept phase to be comparable. He also suggested trying the idea out in water and thinking about keeping the turbine at normal turbine heights before trying to go high ( and get all the aircraft problems sorted). I liked him very sane. It was he who made the crazy but workable statement. He also counciled  against relying on anometer data. Putting a real load on the turbine produces different result.

While we were chatting Godfrey Boyle the new professor turned up and also said he thought the idea was original but not with out merit. Definitly worth pursing in more detail. They both made a couple of offers which I'm not going to hold them to but the idea of getting a student to do some CFD work as floated. So in the end very very encouraging.

In the afternoon Dominc the Technology transfer office came over. He is all set up to do part 2 of the RCUK competition ( deadline mid march ) and told me the OU can cover patents but you need to fill in the form and wait for the OU to think about it and really have a reason for doing it (i.e exploitation in mind).  I told him the simple patent was out of the question and I need to think of something more sophisticated and detailed - perhaps when I've finished the next round of development.

After that I discovered Dominc is a manic iPhone user so we ended up having a great chat. Turns out the OU's biggest patentors are the biologists.

So what now - well no response from the airship people ( I think they have guessed I'm mad) but perhaps the existence of the previous patents means I can talk to people more freely.

I said to D. that I could go for writing the paper with the results and not jepodieze the patent with the research paper.

Many be some one likes me

I got word from RCUK
"Thank you for submitting this. I will await your TTOs email. 

Kind Regards," 
And I got word from the TTO that he sent it in this morning.

So how far do I expect this to go ? Not that far to be honest. I've presented this idea to a room full of MBA and it got zero responses and they responded more positivity in  later an exercise to an idea which was fundamentally a perpetual motion machine.

Still I couldn't let an opportunity like this go by.

I don't want to cross my fingers on this. I shouldn't have to hope to chance that a potential solution to global warming should get a far hearing. I think this is the best one page I could do on this and while I feel sorry about getting the timing wrong I feel the idea is worthy enough to survive with out me.

Apology

I was planing to enter a new wind turbine idea into an RCUK business plan competition. I thought the deadline was the 12 but it turns out it was the 4th ( friday). Unfortunately the OU's TTO office wasn't in that day ( it was a Friday )
So I had to send it in any way and emailed the TTO. I'm hoping for the best. But I do feel like I've let the eco side down terrifically.
Both Mike and Ruth ( who read the one page I had to deliver ) said it sounded good. I really didn't want to do much with it until I had the PHD but the RCUK business plan competition was too go to miss.

Help with new technology ventures from UCL - http://www.cselondon.com/newventurelinks.htm

intreasting winturbine observation of the day

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbines


'The tall towers and blades up to 90 meters long are difficult to transport. Transportation can now cost 20% of equipment costs'.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_profile_power_law

from this a wind turbine running at 2000 meters might get 10 times the wind speed i.e 1000 times the power is this right. The numbers say so but what about the decrease in pressure. 2000 meters it he top of the boundary layer were the logarithmic flow is.

Meeting with Godfey Boyle

Hard to meet one of you presonal heros but I did.

Really nice guy and a mac user to. I told him about the new windturbine idea and he said hewould put me in touch with someone who might beable to help.

This could be it.

More for windfarms..

Interesting article in New Scientist 

"The upshot of this is that until now wind farms have only been built where there is no aviation radar nearby. That's not too much of a problem in the wide open spaces of the US and continental Europe, but is more limiting for a small island like Britain. Forty wind farm projects that would have generated up to 6 gigawatts of power - representing £12 billion of investment in renewable energy - have been refused planning permission for this reason."

If there was some kind of alternate bladeless wind turbine then it might have a lot more placement opportunities (£12 billion worth).

Airships

I had a good time watching Hindeburg last night. Most of the focus was on the use of hydrogen as the gas for the balloon.

I have always wondered if you could mix expensive non flamable helium with cheap light flamable hydrogen. I did a seach on the internet and found that someone mentioned a 60/40 mix of helium to hydrogen worked well but this was on an home hobbyist website so it is unclear if they did any experiments on the viable range of ratios. I presume it depends what you mean by flamable. Still reducing the cost of helium by 40% sounds like a good saving. I wonder to what extent hydrogen would differentially leak out more than helium through the skin to. There was lots of chatter about helium being a fossil resorce to ( i.e it will run out at some point).

I made a list of the things I would like to see in my ideal airship design.

1. Helium hydrogen mix - Hydrogen can carry 30% more load per unit volume than helium so I guess the mix would be 10-20% more than helium.

2. Heat the non flamable mix with heat from the engines again we make the system a bit more like a hot air balloon. A small saving but we where going to throw the heat away anyway.

3. Meathane balder(s). Meathan is also lighter than air. I think a bladder would be less weight than a tank ( I could be wrong). Perhaps it would be a mix of cold tank with escaping methane boiling off. Makes you wonder if you could run a stiling engine with the cold part on the semi cryogentic fule tank.

4. Make the shape more likely to generate lift from forward movement. This way you can get the airship to sink when you stop. Needs clever software to make the right shape when pressureised in the envelope.

5. Like the Goodyear airships mount pivoted (or ducted) engines this way you can use them for short bursts to not only to push you up at lift off but also pull you down on landing.

6. Lots of new materials like Kevlar,Mylar and Carbon fiber.

Finally the huge crews for landing are a poor thing operationally. Perhaps we need to have a metal rope lowered from the airship and the tower to have a number of electromagnatic 'arms'. The rope goes near the arms and is held by a strong magnetic force. Once fixed the airship winches its self down until low enough for a crew member to affix a number of more conventional ropes.

Naturally the big question with a modern airship is what to do with it. Slower than an aircraft or helicoper, with difficulties in high wind. For me the natural thing to do is to take advantage of the high wind forces and use the airship as an aerostat wind turbine. The obvious think to look at is moving large hevey objects around - things beyond the lifting range of a helicoper. Some thing I think others have though of before.

VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE

I found this link on half bakery. VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE it does sound quite cool. Makes you wonde what the rules are
Link: go . I was looking around thinking about harnessing the aerostat turbines in very remote locations to compress air and then condense it. If I read the diagrams right by compressing to 100 atm at about room temperature the C02 will condense out as a liquid. Assuming this can be pumped off and the expanding air used to assist the compression of the incoming air ( lets get 20% of the energy we put in back ). Then perhaps we could use the power of the wind to extract out liquid C02 that we could then pump down wells or down to the bottom of the ocean ( so looks like I want to run this on a ship or platform teathered out in the ocean).

Wickpedia has some other possibly better C02 mittigation possiblies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide )