I notice over the years, certain non-wind people pronounce VAWT as a word: “Vawt”. It seems simple enough to them - they’ve seen it in print, and think of it as “a word”. I’ve aways seen that as an obvious sign that they were not technical wind people, as a sign of a lack of familiarity, or even a lack of intelligence. I’ve never heard real wind people pronounce the acronym as a word, even when the axis is vertical.
Real wind people very seldom talk about Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT’s) at all, except as a joke, and if they do, they usually specify “Darrieus” or “Savonius”, especially if mounted transversely (horizontally, across the wind). In fact, as the person with more types of wind turbines patented than anyone in the world, I believe I may have been the first to introduce the term “cross-axis”, likely in response to the extreme and never-ending ignorance of the perpetual newbies in AWE forums.
There’s another term I introduced: “perpetual newby”. which would seem to be an oxymoron, but is nonetheless accurate in the field of AWE, where pretty much all parties (numbering in the thousands!) pretending to participate, do in fact function (or fail to function) perpetually as mere newbies, who have never, and will never, create a viable working wind energy system of any kind. Hard to imagine thousands of people all making the same empty claims of future progress, yet 100% of whom have never bothered to build even a single wind energy system of any kind that has been actually placed into general service, right?
Anyway, you repeating over and over that turbines with a transverse, horizontal axis, are somehow “really” “vertical-axis” machines is just a mark of stubborn, persistent ignorance. This is especially true with the Magenn MARS system, since there has never been a equivalent machine mounted vertically. “Real wind people” know that the Darrieus- and Savonius-type rotors can be mounted at any angle to the Earth, with the only requirement being that they are at least partially “transverse” to the wind.
I noticed that word “transverse” the other day when reading about V-6 car engines being mounted either “longitudinally” or “transversely” and immediately realized that “transverse-axis” may be an even better (more specific) term than the more general “cross-axis” for horizontally-mounted, cross-axis wind turbines, since even when mounted vertically, they may still be technically called “cross-axis” since the axis is perpendicular to the wind, where the word “transverse” seems even more specific as to the axis of rotation extending horizontally across the wind.
Of course the immediate disadvantage of horizontal mounting is it throws away the entire usual rationalization for vertical-axis turbines, which is of course, that they “do not need to aim”. Anyway, undue attention, or in your case, endless fixation, on the Magenn debacle as some sort of viable wind energy device, alone, is a mark of being out of touch with the realities of wind energy, while insisting it is a vertical-axis wind turbine goes even beyond the most absurd statements by the most absurd people (who will go unnamed) in airborne wind energy forums.
You know what I often wonder, Pierre? You went on for years about your original idea for modifying the Italian concept of kites pulling a carousel around in a circle, with what you called the “rotating reeling” concept. Now I never took more than 2 seconds trying to figure out exactly what you meant by “rotating reeling” because i did not feel it was worth wasting any mental energy on. I figured if you said you had a workable idea, well that is wonderful, and if it were true, we’d know about it soon enough.
Well, as the years rolled on, your fixation kept shifting to various other “breakthrough” ideas, all of which you talked about with great enthusiasm, wanting to be taken seriously. What I wondered the whole time was "What happened to the “rotating-reeling” concept (whatever that actually was), and if it were such a great idea, why did you never build one, and why did you stop talking about it?
These days, we’ve had a similar few years of you promoting the “spinning sausage” concept, probably due to that French group who is insisting it is going to save the world. You scold people for not reading your longwinded descriptions of what will probably never work anyway, and as you have told me, merely amuse yourself, pretending to be doing serious wind energy research through your idle tippity-tapping on your keyboard.
This new fixation on naming machines that a 5-year-old could tell us has a horizontal-axis, even if he didn’t know the word “horizontal”, seems to go beyond the endless nonsense we suffered from that most famous nonsensical personality from the old forum who many took seriously, until it became obvious to even the most gullible people, that he was completely out-of-it, and someone whose influence was best avoided.
Anyway, i leave you with another “new” term in wind energy: “transverse-axis” for a wind turbine arranged across the wind, horizontally. So don’t say I’ve never done anything for you! 