Nigeria will be a leader in AWE

Hi Doug: The initial Laddermill you invented is a pure drag device, and until now you want somebody develop it… Perhaps John?

Hi Pierre! I know I have stated in the past that the reason I quickly transitioned from the " “Auto-Oriented Wind Harnessing Buoyant Aerial Tramway” that I invented in 1977 at age 19 (more recently called “Laddermill” by Ockels)
to
SuperTurbine(R)
was to go from a largely drag-based machine to a more lift-based machine, however, if you look close, you’ll see that my flying Tramway idea DID use airfoils, which did serve to support the weight of the “blades” by "lift"on the descending leg of travel. The diagram shows straight-line travel, but again, it is just an initial sketch to show the general concept. Curved paths would entail “lift” at many more sections of the overall travel. Where the blades would travel exactly upward, they would be traveling at high speed, exactly crosswind, generating the same amount of “lift” as a modern wind turbine blade at that point. Many such refinements occurred to me immediately after drawing it.
SuperTurbine:
A propeller runs crosswind, using “lift” and “holds its ground” - (does not travel downwind). So it is almost 100% lift based, from the start.
BUT, you have to keep in mind that my initial sketch of my “Aerial Tramway” at age 19 in 1977 does not define how the idea has evolved in my mind since.
First of all, I am just so glad I had the presence of mind to draw that sketch, have it notarized and witnessed, and have my parents put it in their safe-deposit box at a bank, and was pleasantly surprised when Ockels came out promoting “laddermill” that I could actually PROVE I thought of it first.

Usually when a “new idea” comes out, some people might SAY they thought of it first, but have no evidence. I was thinking even way back then that someday wind energy would be in the sky, someone would come up with my idea, and I could see ahead of the fact that I had better get it down on paper, officially documented that I thought of it first.

I was very glad when I called home and asked if my parents could dig it up and send it to me that they were able to locate it and mail it to me.

Wanna know a few other predictions I made?
How about this one:
We toured New York City when I was maybe 11 years old (1969?) and were in the Empire State Building, top floor outside on the deck, making little paper airplanes and throwing them over the fence (bad boys!) , looking over at the World Trade Center under construction. One of the two towers had it’s cladding on, with the many side-by-side white vertical columns which, from a distance, swam or danced in front of my eyes, like some sort of mirage or optical illusion. It suddenly hit me that the tower was designed to convince a pilot flying a jetliner that it was OK to fly right into it, because it didn’t look quite real. “Mom! Dad! That building is designed for an airliner to fly into it!” I cried. Of course nobody saw it the way I did and they wouldn’t listen. I kept telling them for the rest of the day that someday an airliner was going to fly into that building, knowing the whole time that:
a) I was right
b) nobody would listen so I might as well stop trying;
c) Nobody would ever remember my prediction when it happened

Sure enough, when it happened, I was one of the few who had known all along the whole thing was planned from day one, and that planning began before the construction even started. And of course my parents had no recollection of my prediction. “Oh well” I said to myself, “that’s just how life is going to be, Doug. Nobody is going to listen to you, and it will be a lifelong problem, better get used to it.”

But at least I got the Aerial Tramway thing documented. No such luck for the World Trade Center.
OK so anyway, the way I see it, Laddermill might not even require an upper wheel to hold it up. The whole thing could fly on its own moving airfoils, which overall are naturally passively self-oriented to provide lift for most of the rotation.
I envision the blades either providing their own elevation force, or depending from other blades that provide enough extra elevation force, that the whole assembly flies and the blades produce power and lift throughout most of their travel. The critical difference would be higher speed. Just as with a regular wind turbine, the blade travel so fast they define their own operating environment. But, going back to the original “stone-age”, “designed by a kid” original design, it would be easier to build a model that at least worked, even if performance was lacking. This is why I say, it seems to me one could be built using plastic bags and cocktail skewers on fishing line, maybe a couple bicycle wheels. This is why I’ve protested many times the endless (at the time) promotion and celebration-ahead-of-the-fact of “laddermill”, combined with giving up on it without anyone ever even TRYING to build even a single simple version - OMG!!!
With ALL THOSE INTERNS - ALL THOSE GRAD STUDENTS!!!
I guess I realized then that having enough perseverance and talent to build or do pretty much ANYTHING was out of the ordinary in today’s dumbed-down, helpless society.
So, long story short, I would surmise that early laddermills could be built using a lot of drag and a little lift, but once you build one, then see how it could be improved, the next one maybe uses a little more lift, a little less drag, and so on until you have something that is actually useful for power production.

And at this point I do not think anyone will ever bother to build one unless it is that same kid who originally thought of it. Most everyone in AWE is on “the all-talk format” unable to work in a shop or build things, thinking they need some huge budget and a staff of 30 or 40 people to even try to do ANYTHING at all, and that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

Why would anyone build the laddermill? Its a nice idea but probably not the first option I would sink my best years into…

I would not explore less than mW scale if I were you :joy:

Hi Tallak: Your point illustrates what I see happening over and over, where actual reasoning goes out the window, and instead, a mental wrestling-match driven by bumper-sticker-level reasoning ensues.

Personally, I was happy to see Ockels celebrated for coming up with what was my original concept. I thought he had given it a clever name, and it seemed like something certainly worth exploring. I felt vindicated that indeed my childhood idea was coming alive decades later.

At that moment, it was “an established fact” that “laddermill” was a great idea, worth exploring, because so many “really smart people”, starting with Ockels himself, agreed with that.

But then, as it came time to stop talking and build one, suddenly it became “a bad idea”, since building one would have taken some effort, while kite-reeling required only buying an off-the-shelf kite, (but they kept the name…)

The questions that immediately came to mind were:

  1. So who decided it would be impossible to build any version of a laddermill?
  2. If laddermill was turning out to be a bad idea, what did that say about how reliable the opinions were, of all those “really smart people” who had previously celebrated the idea?
  3. If Ockels had been celebrated for thinking up laddermill, and yet it had supposedly turned out to be a bad idea, then why were they still celebrating Ockels in the first place? Because writing an essay had won him a trip on the space shuttle? But that had nothing to do with laddermill or AWE in general. What they were really saying was they had collectively been delusional, - yesterday - but today they were once again “really smart people!” Even though their previous “really smartness” had been a delusion. In other words, they had decided they were all, collectively, subject to delusional thinking over something that was, in their minds, easily “disproven”, but everyone was supposed to ignore the elephant-in-the-room - they had already decided they were proven idiots - before - but now they were the smartes people in the room once again.
  4. If “laddermill” had turned out to be a bad idea, then what was the point of keeping the name? So they could keep celebrating Ockels, now rationalized by him getting credit for merely coming up with the name?
    To me, the whole scenario was self-disproving.
    To me, the whole idea that Ockels should be celebrated for laddermil yet laddermill was a bad idea, and that all the people who had celebrated laddermill were “really smart”, but had abandoned laddermill without ever trying to build a single one made no sense.
    If laddermill was a “bad idea”, that that disproved the notion that all the people who had celebrated laddermill were “really smart people”. In that case, nobody should listen to whatever they said next, because they had supposedly already disproven themselves as reliable sources.

Meanwhile I don’t think the laddermill idea is disproven, all I see is people are too lazy to even try building one out of plastic bags and cocktail skewers.

Maybe they should try offering a Boy Scout merit badge for building a laddermill, and some 12-year-olds could solve the mystery and get one running. :slight_smile:

Hi Doug: Again I fail to see the logic in blaming (besides that, with the parachutes, you are talking about a drag device, which is the least efficient type of wind energy system commonly pursued.) John for positively considering drag-based AWES (for what you pretend), while you persist in praising your invention Laddermill which is a drag-based AWES (power is generated while the kites are moving away downwind), complaining with persistence and since numerous years that it was never built.

As for any drag-based wind energy device.

Hello Pierre: Please try reading what I wrote more carefully. I thought I explained pretty clearly that, while my original design was mostly drag-based, it still used airfoils that created lift during the entire downhill leg, just to help keep the system elevated. With further development, laddermill could evolve to a mostly- or fully-lift-powered device.

There is a reason I did not use parachutes. Of course parachutes were the first, obvious choice, I went a step further, and used pivoting, passively-oriented, inflated air-mattress-style kite-wings, with very nice airfoils, for a reason: generating lift. Look at the entire downhill section of the drawing: all the “kites” are “flying” downhill. And the “kites” generate lift at the downwind section of the wheels they go around. If you could eliminate the top wheel, the upward path could be generating lift and pulling hard throughout most of the uphill leg of travel. It is an evolution of an idea that I’m talking about. If people are afraid to even TRY, obviously they will never be able to improve, let alone perfect, an idea. As pointed out, that Chinese parachute pumping system did seem to have moments of good output. That’s a starting place. Lots of room for improvement.

And as I so carefully explained, my continuing and evolving vision for a laddermill development effort would be to start with one that even worked at all - it would have to be stable, rotate, and at least be able to generate SOME power. Heck, a starting place might be one that just ran, period, without even taking any power from it! Let’s just get it working! But no, most people would rather “just give up”.

After a stable-running configuration is accomplished, the next steps would be to slowly refine the design to use more lift, and less drag, by increasing the speed and making whatever adjustments are needed toward that goal.

At some point, the goal, as I see it at this moment, would be to get it to run so well it no longer needed the upper stationary kite for support at the upper end, but instead flew by itself, using almost 100% lift and nearly zero drag.

You gotta pay attention to these details. My thinking will not fit on a bumper-sticker. Well ,maybe some of it will, like “idiots, idiots, idiots…”

Maybe I could make some money printing “idiots, idiots, idiots…” bumper stickers! I’ll bet a lot of people feel that way about a lot of things! Could be a big seller! Thanks for the great idea Pierre! (Just what I need, another project…) :slight_smile:

Edit: By the way, as I recall, even the Ockels crowd had evolved the idea to a high-speed, lift-based device, on paper. Weren’t they down to a single string instead of two? I seem to remember little swept-wing airplane wings without a fuselage on a single loop. My input would be to just start wityh something that could even run, then when you see what you are really dealing with, adjust it until you get what you are looking for.

Let me tell you one thing I learned in developing SuperTurbine: Your first try of any new idea will fail, and fail again, showing you all the failure modes if you keep trying. It’s the “keep trying” part that eventually gets you to a smooth-running machine with overspeed protection. I have a collection of maybe 20 burned out stators just to perfect the overspeed protection of the SuperTwin, and I’m still learning! How many rockets had to be built before we got to the moon? They started with small models that could go up 100 feet. How many cars had to be built before we had 200 mph racing cars? You have to start somewhere to get anywhere. Key concept: “start”.

Indeed the lift is not used to sweep the wind area. So I confirm it is a drag-based AWES.

However parachutes can also generate lift, " just to help keep the system elevated". I don’t see any fundamental difference with airfoils in Laddermill configuration.

You promise something for a hypothetical future that you keep decrying in others.

For what I remember a crosswind version has been studied by Wubbo Ockels, named Spidermill. But all this is only a hypothesis, no more.

Well, to start with, the parachutes of the parachute version are pointed upside-down when traveling downward, so they would not be generating any lift, or helping to elevate them in any way when going downward.

As I explained, in my original drawing, there would be upward pull, and power generated, from “lift” at points downwind of the wheels. The airfoils would even be generating some lift on the downwind, uphill-traveling leg of the “Tramway”, even as originally drawn. Why do you think they are airfoils instead of parachutes? And as speed is increased, those zones of lift would increase in both magnitude and extent.

I’ve explained all this in such detail, it is mystifying to me that you don’t seem to be understanding what I’ve been saying. At some point, all this internet chit-chat can only accomplish so much. I can only try. As they say, “You can’t push a rope”. (A good thing for AWE people to keep in mind)

The fact of the matter is I also envisioned kite-reeling, but I was only around maybe 8 or 9 years old by then. My Dad and I had joined a father/son group called Indian Guides, which was very popular in our part of the country back then. I think I was in second grade so I would have been 6 or 7 years old when we first joined. I remember getting the Indian Guides handout in my second-grade classroom. We wore yellow headbands with blue feathers, and took on our version of “Indian names”. We had “tribes” that would meet regularly at members’ homes, big events at overnight camps and even a local mansion, and craft projects. It was a YMCA program.

Well, at one point I nominated my Dad for the position of “Chief”, and he got elected. So when we had to have a crafts “project”, my Dad was trying to come up with something both fun and affordable, and he decided on KITES.

That was how our basement became a kite factory at maybe age 7 or 8 for me. We made kite kits for the whole tribe in our basement. All it required was my Dad’s table saw to cut lumber into kite-sticks, some multi-colored tissue-paper, and some string and glue. Suddenly at the same age I was still learning to read, I had already become a “kite expert”.

Before long I was making kites and selling them. When I would go out to fly our kites, I would lament the repetition required to reel the kite in and out, and wish I had a powered reel to reel the kite IN, and I already knew that a DC motor also worked as a generator from other projects we worked on, so I would dream about a kite-reel with a DC motor that could generate power on the reel-out phase of flight. That was in about 1966 or so. I have always been way ahead of the curve in AWE, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Now, back to the subject at hand: laddermill. If you still can’t understand how it could be improved, and think I should somehow(?) have John build his parachute version, or whatever, I really don’t know what to say. I could scarcely convince John or any of those guys about anything. They can scarcely understand anything I say. Usualy they just want to argue about well-established facts. Personally I don’t think ANY pf them, including John, will EVER build anything AWE-related, and I wouldn’t want to depend on any of “the circular firing squad” to implement any AWE idea, given their dismal track record.

But it is an open field, anyone could build one, and I’m certainly not stopping anyone, but rather sharing my ideas for it freely, encouraging people to try it, all the while knowing it is unlikely anyone is even listening, let alone going to do anything about it. That’s OK, I’m used to it! :slight_smile:

Yeah, “spidermill”. Glad to learn I’m not the only one who is not clear on what the term even was supposed to refer to. Santos seems to declare every so often that he is working on some aspect of “spidermill”. Where is it today? Nowhere.

Yeah, sure, Ockels was “studying” “spidermill”. Notice all the quotes?
Not building, not testing, just “studying”, and we don’t even know what the term means. Back to “the all-talk format”.

Like “laddermill”, it is just a name - a title that can be suddenly applied at will to whatever their latest unworkable pet project happens to be. Spidemill is an empty word - a NOTHING-BURGER, and the people pretending to be pursuing it are not really doing much of anything.

The Western Isles scouts group still holds the record for longest operational field deployment of a kite turbine. :medal_military: :tada: :partying_face: :clinking_glasses:
It was tied to up to a tree however and there was very little wind
oh well, got to start somewhere

Now Doug finally knows different. JAL folks have varied experience in multiple branches of wind energy. They revel in fresh (childlike) thinking. Jaded or despairing pessimists are most unlikely to seek and discover novel solutions.

The “parachute-loop” diagram is a conceptual schematic of common “cloud suck”, not a design. Sails that can harvest in any wind direction, vertical AND horizontal, are a more realistic design model. Skilled sailors can use almost any wind, from the slightest breeze to considerable gales, by proven methods. This is wind power more flexible than anything bolted to a pole and left alone.

Equatorial Zonal Winds are a special grand challenge. The ITCZ is a storm belt that moves seasonally, and whose storms shift day to day. Higher latitude Rossby Waves form long rivers of wind. Storm winds may indeed someday be actively intercepted by mobile AWES, at sea or in the sky. Its proven storms enhance sessile wind power at the right places and right times.

UK windfarms generate record amount of electricity during Storm Malik | Wind power | The Guardian
Another case of a “windfall”-

Power prices plunge as Storm Eunice causes some of the highest-EVER output from wind turbines | Daily Mail Online

New insight- By inherent “sailing” flexibility, AWE may prove able to generate in high winds when conventional HAWTs are curtailed.

Just so, debating Doug is fertile, to prompt ideas that may overcome his despair.

Sailors are top wind-pros, mano-a-mano. Those who dare-

“When others run from storms, our sailors chase them! Here’s a view from the sky”

~5MW demo

Riding the storm | Volvo Ocean Race - YouTube

OK just so the people running this venue understand, the above message that I am now replying to is nothing but Dave Santos using John O’s account as a means of posting here, even though he is supposedly not allowed to post here. If you’ve been exposed to his writing for years like me, it is easy to identify by its haughty tone that goes on citing other people’s names in tones of glorification or demonization, to create an emotional aura of threatening authority, while saying nothing or next-to-nothing. One thing we never see from him is significant output from a wind energy device. All in all, I think you can safely ignore whatever he says here without missing anything important.

Hi Dave. To debate you is futile because all you ever want is to talk. By providing logical reasoning we are playing into your game where you can reply with nonsense

Talking while kite flying, true enough, but where is your “logical reasoning” in this debate? I have presented ample logical reasoning in favor of power kites over higher L/D platforms.

“Nonsense” in this debate is your thing-

Question for Tallak: What is the annual capacity factor for high L/D energy-drone kiteplanes?

Tallak: Let me … give … a … number …. what about ….

   /$     /$    /$$$  /$   /$
 /$$   /$$   /$$_  $|__/  /$/
|_  $  |_  $  | $$\ $     /$/ 
  | $    | $  | $ $ $    /$/  
  | $    | $  | $\ $$   /$/   
  | $    | $  | $ \ $$  /$/    
 /$$$ /$$$|  $$$/ /$/  /$
|______/|______/ \______/ |__/  |__/

Perhaps no one in AWE has flown more nor more diverse wings and experiments, no talking-

Mothra Sand Launch 8:26 - YouTube

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Hi Dave. Is 110% capacity more nonsensical than the 90% you state?

Perhaps some people who profess interest in AWE are not actually “in AWE”, but only “in” AW - airborne wind, (or kite-flying). AWE involved producing energy, with the stated goal of replacing windfarms, or at least producing electric grid power. The key word here is “ENERGY”. Without producing ENERGY, someone is not “in” AWE, but only in AW.

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