I suppose if they were serious, they could easily build a scale model, put it in salt water, and see how well their idea actually works. But wait for it “Nobody will take us seriously unless we build it at utility-scale”…
Of course - the next “symptom” of “The Syndrome”
Every time I see another attempt to place a ring generator at the outer periphery of blade-travel for any turbine, whether vertical or horizontal, I think of the Honeywell failed roof-mounted turbine with its slow-speed, high-solidity rotor.
It is amazing how the same common symptoms keep rearing up, like a game of “Whack-a Mole” - the mole (symptom) comes up out of its hole so you whack it, but it just pops up again from a different hole.
If you try to tell any of these people they suffer from a well-recognized syndrome with defined symptoms, they can’t grasp what you’re talking about.
I had a guy with a sketch of an archimedian screw in a tube with a peripheral ring generator, ask for my analysis and possible partnership. It was painful to see his reaction as I tried to explain that his idea combined several known ill-advised and long-disproven “symptoms”, that it was a nice first try, but he needed to get up to speed on how wind energy worked in order to improve it.
He went berserk at the “nice try” diagnosis, dismayed that I could not understand the genius of his unassailable idea. How could I not see that the archimedian tube would suck more air through itself, magically yielding a vastly increased output (like a perpetual motion machine?) and be such a huge improvement for wind energy?
I tried to use the example of applying it to today;s utility-scale turbines at a 600-foot diameter and asked how much his tube might cost at 600 feet diameter and a half-mile long. (???)
Well of course at that point he had to admit it might be better for smaller turbines, missing the entire point that I had only mentioned today’s huge scale to illustrate the point that his design used way more material, equating to way more cost, than a regular turbine which, after 1000 years of development, uses comparatively very little material to sweep a huge area.
It would not have even made sense to try to explain how inefficient his backwards and inside-out design was, and there was no point in trying to explain any of the finer points regarding how turbines actually make power at high efficiency.
Of course he was far far away from building even the most rudimentary prototype. That;ls how he knew how much of a genius he was - no need to actually prove it - it was “obvious” from his sketch!
Like so many crackpots, he was allergic to facts, they would bounce off him like bullets bounce off Superman.
His last communication to me promised to make a video showing the world what a terrible person I was. At that point I was rolling on the ground laughing - as though this guy was EVER going to do ANYTHING but brag about what what he could not even comprehend was an idea that would use an order of magnitude more material to get an order of magnitude less power. That;s two orders of magnitude of “terrible” - like literally 100 times worse than a regular turbine.
It is all just SO PREDICTABLE - these people have nowhere to go but blame the experienced people for their own ignorance, trying to flip it over, as though they are the real authority and the experienced person just can’t understand what makes their idea so great.
Anyway, you’ve gotta appreciate the comedy. Of course, it helps to understand wind energy, in order to get the joke. 