Hi Doug: I waited three days, but I knew you would end up falling for chocolates in the shape of Professor Crackpot, especially during this time. 
Hi Pierre: Yes thatâs the problem with the holidays: Hard to resist chocolate etc. BTW, did you know both chocolate and vanilla originated in Mexico? Not to mention corn, tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers of all types - all from America. The list goes on and onâŠ
Oh yeah - Professor Crackpot - yup, heâs for real! And lurking everywhere!
Say, did you hear about the James Webb Space Telescope? As I predicted, all they found was âmore of the sameâ - old galaxies, no âbaby galaxiesâ, and itâs not looking good for âthe big bangâ anymore. Latest I heard was they need to move it back billions of years and the old 13.8 billion-year age of the universe no longer makes sense.
This should be a âProfessor Crackpotâ lesson for you too. When âall the scientistsâ are said to agree on something, it will probably turn out NOT to be true, as time rolls on. Extrapolate to other situations where it is said that, say, 96% of all scientists agree on something. What I realized way back when Dr. Stephen Hawking first said ânothing can escape from a black holeâ, to which all of science immediately agreed, then changed his mind to say black holes can radiate energy away, to which all of science immediately agreed, that often, there are very few scientists who actually do the work to figure anything out. The rest, which by some definitions included junior-high-school science teachers, are just along for the ride, and do not discover or hypothesize much of anything, ever. Mostly they just repeat what theyâve heard, or what they know sounds right to keep those paychecks comingâŠ
More wind energy comedy for you:
(2) Could this Turbine Destroy Solar? | Why havenât we seen these small wind turbines yet⊠- YouTube
A girl tries to analyze and predict which âProfessor Crackpotâ turbine will âdestroy solarâ. She seems to favor a vertical-axis Savonius, which of course will barely make any power whatsoever, but since when does anyone making a YouTube video have to know anything about what they are even discussing?
I did contribute a comment or two. One comment I found was entertaining: A know-nothing know-it-all declaring the superiority of his concept of a wind-driven Ferris Wheel featuring high-solidity sails around the periphery, with a friction-driven generator at ground level. He points readers to his website, tension turbine dot com, but he had spelled âtensionâ wrong when registering the site, so you actually have to go to âtention turbine dot comâ to see a minimal rendering of the concept. He claims that his low-speed sails are where the real power can be found. All well and good. One more âinventionâ, where the only problems are its main features!
Anyway, if anyone wants to know where the term âidiots, idiots, idiotsâ came from, it is stuff like this - idiocy piled upon ignorance, in multiple layers. If only it were a cake, we could eat it! But no matter how good it tastes, it is nothing but junk food!
Thatâs a very nice idea. With the higher solidity it can rotate slower and with that lower the requirements on the blades and with that their cost, and also increase the rotor diameter further before your blade tips are going supersonic, and now instead of huge bending moments on the blades you can rely on the tension and strength of the bicycle wheel. All roads lead to bicycle wheels, I guess. It is a simpler, more practical way to do rotary tensile torque transfer. Or maybe if ever larger rotors using the current methods donât pan out, you could look at this.
I would raise the hub height though to move the entire wheel off from the ground maybe, and perhaps make it a downwind rotor.
Itâs a descendant of this: WindJammer IV Infomercial and other similar concepts.
Letâs ignore how to make, erect, and maintain such a giant wheel for now though.
From the website:
- All generators are at ground level, no cranes required â (Rim Driven)
Other rim driven wind turbines has been evoked, for example here.
Some direct links are mentioned below.
BarberWind:
This is an example of how the people making videos, running discussion groups, etc., involving wind energy, are the least aware people of all, regarding the efficacy of the various technologies.
Slower rotation = lower efficiency. Farm water-pumping windmills get about half the power of regular electric wind turbines, and all attempts to electrify them have fallen by the wayside.
more ignorance: tip speed is not controlled by diameter.
You mean like this debunked wind turbine,
(27) The Curse That Keeps on Giving: Honeywell WindTronics Redux | LinkedIn
also promoted by the same guy associated with the old forum that just restarted his nonsense here today? Can this be a coincidence? Nope, itâs par for the course. You guys are all the same!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, copycat - get your own slogan!
Ah yes, the newbie myth that somehow âtorqueâ is some mysterious, hard-to-transfer force!
Yes it seems compelling. I remember seeing a bicycle-wheel turbine in my first pamphlet on wind energy in the 1970âs. Part of the hippy movement. It was already not being taken very seriously, way back then. Somehow, the idea never worked out well enough to gain any traction.
Yeah yeah yeah, maybe this, maybe thatâŠ
Yeah, and make all that crap on the ground rotate with the turbine. The perpetual newbies always have all the answers!
Wow, great quality video! So old it was still touting the now-debunked officially-sanctioned outrage over âacid rainâ. Yes, this design has come a long way now, hasnât it? Thatâs because itâs so great!
Yes, letâs ignore any and all details of any aspect of this, so we can keep saying how great it is!
Now donât get me wrong, I LOVE ideas like this and have many myself. However, at some point, we have to see through the trees and look at the whole forest. A Ferris-wheel that canât aim and gets less power than a wind turbine, being far less efficient, while costing more, will always be just âa nice ideaâ and nothing more! And itâs only âa nice ideaâ for people who donât know any better. All this stuff is well understood by those in the know. Thatâs why they are not in production today! not that complicated.
And of course Honeywell wind turbine which Iâm not sure @dougselsam is a huge fan of:
I just saw Dougâs reference to this turbine.
Hi Pierre: Yes, as you know, not a huge fan. A couple of points:
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It looks like these are not actually for sale on the Honeywell store website, but rather, you found an old link that is still functional. At least I couldnât find it on their âmenuâ or in their âsearchâ box (for âwind turbineâ). At some point, they must be embarrassed and/or tired of getting negative feedback and/or ruining their reputation. Youâve gotta figure they would be charging thousands of dollars for a product that will not make anyone happy, and by the time it is installed and provided with an installed, and connected inverter, it would turn into a REAL waste of time and money.
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If you remember back, Honeywell BOUGHT this design from a previous company that had originally developed and promoted it. I used to wonder how Honeywell, a maker of aerospace and aviation products used in Jetliners etc., with all those aerospace engineers, could have fallen for this obviously-bad (to those who know better) design.
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But then, after watching a lot of hang-gliding crash videos to try and learn how to avoid disaster myself, I started getting fed airplane crash videos over and over. One thing I noticed was the problem in many jet airliner crashes was defective components from⊠(drumroll pleaseâŠ) Honeywell!
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Itâs also an example of how it doesnât matter how many âreally smart peopleâ you have, if they donât know about wind energy, they are more dangerous than people who know they donât know, because being âreally smartâ, they think they have nothing to learn, and believe that their instinctive impressions are valid, and indeed superior, to the actual knowledge out there, learned from the school of hard knocks.
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I remember a conversation with some stranger about vertical-axis wind turbines. He countered my admonitions with a rebuttal that he knew some guys about to install several utility-scale vertical-axis turbines in a certain country (which will go unmentioned), telling me they were some âreally smart people!â My thought was "oh no, not that again - not more âreally smart peopleâ thinking they can break all the rules in wind energy! My response was that âreally smart peopleâ installing vertical-axis turbines was an oxymoron.
Good idea, Pierre. I think all wind energy devices should have loudspeakers so they can play heavy metal music whenever the wind blows. That would cover up blade noise. The neighbors would then be happy.
Only thing is, what if every turbine was playing a different song, all at the same time?
By the way, blade noise is one more overhyped aspect, often touted by wind energy newbies with nothing else to say about wind energy than mundane half-truths and irrelevant nothingness. Like Dabiri using the excuse of âbiomimicryâ to rationalize one more round of âresearchâ promoting vertical-axis turbines.
It didnât matter that anyone wanting to place smaller wind turbines between the larger ones in windfarms would simply leave the smaller ones in place when repowering with larger turbines, or use horizontal-axis turbines anyway, the âfocusâ was subtly changed from actual energy production to "biomimicry(!!!) Wheeee!
Yesterday as I was walking through a building here in the early morning, I noticed some flickering from the sunlight passing through a wind turbine rotor, then through the windows, into a room. It made me think of all the ânewsâ stories about children susceptible to seizures, having those seizures triggered by wind turbine shadow flickering, making the rounds maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Once again, wind energy discussions reduced to whatever bumper-sticker-level concept might sound ânewsworthyâ and understandable by the average person, who lacks the knowledge to discuss any real, relevant aspects of wind turbines, such as how the airfoils operate, etc.
Savonius turbines have great advantages:
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low tip speed ratio (TSR) which make them a friend of bats and birds;
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they are particularly suitable for AWES where they have proven themselves with Magenn Power, combining generating torque with lift by Magnus effect;
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AWES and Savonius turbines are suitable in remote areas.
For these and other reasons both AWES and Savonius turbines are the future of wind energy.
If you want to learn more about this, instead of trying to bait someone with a comment like this, who also doesnât really know what theyâre talking about, it would be much quicker and more effective to read a book about it so you can calculate things yourself and arenât perpetually dependent on someone else to do the thinking for you.
Yesterday we had some high winds here. Once again, I noticed shadow-flickering of the morning sunlight entering the room. This time, however, the flickering was from sunlight filtering through trees blowing in the wind. âOh goodâ, I thought, âthe flickering is only from trees, so I donât need to have an epileptic seizureâ.
However, it just goes to show, in order to be âgreenâ, not only do we need to get rid of all the CO2 that feeds trees and all green plants in the world, but trees themselves should be outlawed, to protect âthe childrenâ from epileptic seizures. I mean, youâre not against children, are you? OK then, no more trees. Then, with no more trees, you canât complain about low CO2 levels. Câmon now everyone, letâs âgo green!â
Donât worry, your âsomeoneâ of course understood that I was joking.
As for publications on Savonius rotors, which ones do you recommend among those I have read?
Please tell me the reasons why.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095034921000568
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610215005652
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333758815_Analysis_on_Blade_Profile_of_Savonius_Wind_Turbine_Using_Computational_Fluid_Dynamics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544218322308
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228818185_Development_of_Optimum_Design_Configuration_and_Performance_for_Vertical_Axis_Wind_Turbine
Not my area of interest. Maybe you could incorporate some of that in your posting, cited preferably, so those who are interested can learn something? Your comment didnât seem to.
I cited publications that I read. Please indicate which ones you prefer.
It wasnât Doug who recommended I read a book on this subject, it was you, I remind you again.
So Iâm waiting for your response: once again, which publication do you recommend among those I cited and read?
None. I donât think Savonius blades have much relevance for AWE, and if they have for a particular system, you can learn more about them when you get that far. I would recommend books about something like machine design instead.
You are interested though, my comment was a reaction to that. You can then say you have read books about that, so there, and you are fine with wasting time baiting people.
âAbout itâ is about Savonius rotors. Again and again I am waiting for the publications you prefer among the list of documents I read.