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12 years ago
For whoever wanted a portable wind turbine
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12 years ago
the early 1980's. Their attempt to hoist an antenna using helium balloons was spectacularly unsuccessful.Depending which account you read the balloons ended up on the continent or wrapped around a traffic bollard in Colchester.
G.Harman
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12 years ago
They cant do engineering and they cant wrote proper English either.
Or avoid being extremely hazardous to air traffic,.
I am thinking that they are all on Prozac, these Greens. Or largactyl.
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12 years ago
Its the same thing these days with the EU being what it is.
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12 years ago
But, in a Green world, there will be no air traffic.
Colin Bignell
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12 years ago
Air ships? Now there is a thought, by powering some of the turbines you could power an airship and reduce the need for engines on the airship. that makes them even greener as they can use nuclear power.
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12 years ago
Nursey - he's slipping back into total incoherence..up the sedative please!
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12 years ago
So, by putting up enough wind turbines, you can give the airship enough power to allow it to fly against the wind? I think you have just invented a perpetual motion device.
Why not just give them their own nuclear reactor? The USA tried to do that with a bomber in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Of course, most of the power from the reactor would have been needed just to lift the shielding for the crew.
Colin Bignell
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12 years ago
Why? Where does the nuclear energy go if its a perpetual motion machine?
The Americans and the Russians both flew planes with working reactors in them. They never did get the engines working AFAIK.
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12 years ago
With an airship you can stick the reactor at one end, the payload at the other, and have them a safe distance apart.
Who needs shielding then?
Andy
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12 years ago
Uh oh. You appear to be thinking outside the box again. And by 'box', I mean 'your padded cell'...
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12 years ago
actually odd as it sounds it is possible to mount a wind turbine on a car and use the electricity to drive it dead into the wind...
they key is the loss of kinetic energy of the wind relative to the ground and the gain of kinetic energy of the car with respect to the ground.
Its not particularly efficient, but unlike most renewable energy claims, it doesnt contravene the laws of Physics...
again its not impossible: the bigger problem is that you tend to leave a radioactive contrail behind you..
But like many many engineering ideas what is possible and what is economic efficient and cheap are several green miles apart..
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12 years ago
The problem with airships - especially helium airships - is simple. The size of structure needed to contain enough gas to lift a reasonable weight rapidly becomes the reasonable weight that you can lift.
In short unless you can find a material with ten to twenty times better strength to weight that carbon fibre and titanium, you are on a hiding to nothing.
A better answer to long duration flight is solar panels and get into the stratosphere: an electric aircraft might be capable of flying above the clouds indefinitely, using stored battery power and gliding at night.
Its VERY marginal, but the energy balance is just about on the plus side.
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12 years ago
Why would that be?
Do subs leave radioactive wakes?
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12 years ago
And this has a connection with wind turbines then? I'm confused. Brian
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12 years ago
Not as confused as harry and the others are about making some of the wind turbines into fans and blowing an airship along, they appear to think its perpetual motion even if they are powered by nuclear. They can't even work out that it was a dig at green energy.
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12 years ago
The NB-36H was 162 feet long and still needed a 4 ton lead shield amidships and foot thick shielding around the cockpit.
Colin Bignell
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12 years ago
I read your idea as being to put the aerial wind turbines in the link onto an airship and to use the energy from those to power it, with the nuclear concept being an additional suggestion.
The Americans flew an NB-36H aircraft with a working reactor as a test bed for the project and ordered the X-6, which would have had nuclear jet engines. However, the project was cancelled before that was delivered. It would have needed a 4.5km long runway to take off.
Colin Bignell
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12 years ago
You missed the link to helium filled ducted fan kites hoisting wind turbines above the boundary layer, then?
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12 years ago
The link supplied by the originator of this thread features a wind turbine supported by helium on the end of a tether. My comment on the radio station was because they thought that they could do away with a conventional mast based antenna system and use one supported by a Helium balloon. These proved completely impractical and promptly blew away,though it is possible that the tethers were damaged by RF . A relatively light helium balloon blowing away is one thing,loosing an expensive generator and having land on someones head is another. I can see small ones might have some application in short term situations like a military operation where cost and possible loss may not be the first concern but the companies aim seems to go beyond that in the future and go into offshore wind farms. Hope they develop strong tethers.
G.Harman