It’s obviously been a tough year for AWES development.
Maybe this is too early (wishful) for an End of Year Review.
How is AWES doing?
I’d love to know forum opinion on how you see the current state of AWES
And how you see it evolving.
What sort of questions would you like to see polled?
for starters
Was there a favourite 2020 zoom call?
Did the IEA TEM meet your needs?
Most surprising result in a lab test, field test, calculation, sim?
Have you been able to keep flying?
Will you be flying more, bigger, faster stronger next year?
AWES logistics must have been tough, has component supply struggled, have you patched?
When will your system be running a test field 24/7? Shipping to customers?
Has regulation and certification been more or less complex?
One note of caution
I feel My own opinions are disproportionately over-represented on this forum. I post regularly but my rotary system architecture is less common in the wider AWES world.
By far the most common architecture is Yo-Yo. Yet to me it seems that few people on the forum actively champion the Yo-Yo method.
Maybe the last question should be opinion of health of the forum. Do we need more Yo-Yo representation? The health of AWES science is measure in these discussions. Personally I am really grateful for the way this forum has been handled and run. A one sided forum has played out before in AWES. This one seems much better. But we still have work to do.
Some of you will have been missing chanting from sports ground terraces. I never do go to these things but I’ll attempt.
COME ON YOU YO-YO’s!!
COME ON YOU YO-YO’s!!
ok that was weird but
COME ON YOU YO-YO’s!!
Certainly this forum is also about AWES that are not too much represented elsewhere.
But Yo-Yo is studied by @tallakt (KiteMill), @Kitepower, @rschmehl even when other aspects than the conversion system itself are detailed. Myself I experimented Low radius loop for Yo-Yo use.
For what I investigated in different AWE method, I have not still seen any robust way for success, but this is not a proof that success is not possible.
For both Yo-Yo and flygen, rigid wings work well at small scale. But for large scale the weight should be drastically reduced. So a work for lighter structures is needed.
For flexible wings, the control accuracy and the lifetime should be improved.
And also carousels comprising NTS X-Wind could be more investigated, with several equipment,comprising rigid or flexible kites, or sails.
When analysing different concepts for AWE, theres always a lot of relative strength in being the simplest possible solution. One kite, one winch, one tether. It cant get much simpler on paper. So even though there are a few problems on the way to producing power I would not count on those problems/deficiencies being worse than added complexity of eg a three kite multi kite design. For this reason, I would not count Yoyo as inferior, spent, dead, proven wrong or anything like that. I think Yoyo is alive and kicking, and wether anyone will ever produce a comercially interesting design just remains to be seen.
At the same time I welcome people going in other directions. We learn from each other, and anyone’s success is a good thing.
Personally I dont think the ultimate AWE has been nearly accurately described yet. We are just uncovering stuff bit by bit, I hope in the end, AWE will just click, and a good design will be apparent, and anyone will see that it should work. I hope
I believe that we should revise our thinking with regard to groundgen systems. ‘Rag and string’ devices have a relatively short operating life and should be designed to be replaced on a regular basis. The payback time for kites and tethers is relatively short and pulleys and turbines can be reconditioned. We should capitalize on the fact that installation costs of AWE systems are minimal compared to conventional wind turbines.
AWE has demonstrated considerable cost savings over conventional wind turbines. The problem is that we have not developed a reliable ‘unassisted’ automatic launch and land system. The equivalent of this is automatic overspeed control for high winds and stopping rotation of turbines in low winds for conventional systems. This problem is increased for large industrial systems where hand launching large kites is dangerous and involves too much manpower.
Does anyone else follow Google News alerts for Airborne Wind Energy?
I don’t really know why I still bother…
About a couple years back they just started flooding with generic market report data.
The purported results of the market analysis are always hidden behind a paywall.
You can contact the vendors for samples … but it’s always re-churned versions of the same irrelevant data.
This further helps users with their developmental strategy. This report examines all the key factors influencing growth of global Airborne Wind Energy …
I think we will continue to see the industry lose players as the economy sputters and certain architectures reach dead ends.
Makani shutting down definitely hurts. I see a parallel with the space tourism industry a decade ago. It’s always been two years to commercial service. Virgin Galactic still hasn’t made it but could be close. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the only other surviving players and they’re close. But new players have come into the parallel commercial space industry and it is dynamic these days with lots of launches. I’m confident AWE will emerge commercially but it could still be another 10 years.
The difficulties are not stopping me. I’ve been recently furloughed so now I’ve got enough time to devote myself to bringing Wind Fisher from idea to prototype before deciding whether to give it a go commercially with a startup.
Nice to have you here. I’d be happy to help by discussing a magnus design if you wish. WindFisher looks like an interesting project.
My tip would be to create your own thread on your idea then we could provide feedback on that. That being said, you will know more about Magnus AWE than me very fast.
