Windswept and Interesting needs you!
We need your brutal honesty to see if we have missed any risks / not properly identified any weakness…
Or maybe just not communicated our mission well enough.
Please feedback on your understanding of how you see kite turbines and our company prospects.
On kite turbines
A founding AWES mech Eng recently commented - In comparing kite turbines to the Swan bridge situation, where a single tower, multi-line suspension bridge had to be retrofitted / reinforced with extra crossing lines to stop sway… is a problem because kite turbines also have multiple lines.
Why I think this isn’t a problem
For 1 there are no humans on the turbine.
2 The bridge lines had to be networked to fix the problem.
Yes kite turbines have dynamic parts. The parts can move, but only in limited relation to each other axially, radially and in circumferentially.
Torsion happens, to a limited and known extent in kite turbines, because we use a cylindrical horn network of longitudinal and circumferential lines around rigidised rings to transmit torque.
Kite rotor dynamics ensure a stable flight which pulls the network open radially, upwards axially and around.
Kite turbine line tension ensures there is enough torsional rigidity for energy transfer.
The initial horn shape prior to torsion acts to expand TRPT rings. The result of TRPT is a spiral line set made of straight lines segments.
(I like to think of the resultant spiral like a straight line path through curved spacetime… Hmmm… Thought process above my pay grade there)
This is a company issue - We need more experienced engineers to help define, build and test Kite Turbines.
We are in phase 1 of a project with a set of plans
But
It’s been a year since Network Kites and Daisy network kite rotors - #117 by Rodread
And We’re still trying to arrange enough funding to test a 10kW automated system.
What do you see as the biggest obstacles to getting funding to test kite turbines?
Where are the risks for W&I?
I want to present our risks on a new site we’re developing kites.energy
The Mech Eng from earlier also considered the multiple lines as more of a tangle risk - and the system as potentially less able to scale… all of which is addressed by tensile networking. Nets are easy to untwist / don’t tangle and enable scaling by exploiting the limits of AWES blade architecture in layers (axially, concentrically and by radial number)
Please pose some challenges we need to address
Thanks for brutal honesty
Rod