[yor_on (OP)]

Heh, better admit that I stole this one from Sapos joint, and yes, it was worth stealing (sorry Sapo). It's too sweet to ignore, especially to those remembering the discussion of a plane on a conveyor band. I know you guys won't settle just for a discussion here though. You're too a inquisitive lot

Take a look. Can a vehicle be built which can go directly downwind, faster than the wind (DDWFTTW), powered only by the wind, steady state?
=

Better add that I'm not as sure about a boat though? Although I think it should be possible if you minimize the resistance relative its 'surfaces'? Still, so da**ed cool.

[dlorde]

The answer is 'yes' for both vehicles and sailboats. For a vehicle, the wheels must be coupled to a prop to leverage the wind speed relative to the ground, and for a boat, it must have a device to leverage wind speed relative to the water (e.g. a keel).

See Sailing Faster Than The Wind.

[yor_on (OP)]

Sweet stuff, although, I want it more esthetic. A sailingboat consisting of propellers may not be the stuff of my dreams Ah well, I do like the speed though..

[dlorde]

You'd use a prop on a land yacht (e.g. sand yacht). For a water sailing boat you could just use the sail and the keel.

[graham.d]

Not sure you need theprop. Wouldn't the wheels have a similar effect to a keel in that they stop sideways movement.

Doesn't work on my boat sadly as I don't get much propulsion when getting closer to the apparent wind than about 40 degrees. It may be interesting to see if I could get more speed "tacking" downwind rather than using a spinnaker, especially if the wind is light. It's hard to test though unless there was another identical boat with the same rig to race.

[David Cooper]

In the last America's Cup they used multihulls which could travel at three times the speed of the wind (e.g. 24 knots in 8 knots of wind). The next America's Cup may see even higher speeds as the technology is developing fast. On land the difference between the speed of a land yacht and the wind should be a lot higher due to a huge reduction in friction compared with dragging a hull through water, and the same applies to ice yachts where I think I remember something about one doing over 100mph (and I think it might also have been about a century ago).

[yor_on (OP)]

You know, I would really like to see that original paper suggesting this effect, and how the guy formulated it. It's referred to in the link I gave, but i didn't find the paper.

[graham.d]

David, with respect to the multihulls in the Americas cup, was it stated they travelled 3x the windspeed going  down wind? It is not so hard to exceed windspeed when going across the wind for example. The best speed is usually when the wind is just forward of the beam. The problem is trying to get a net speed in a windward direction (even with tacking) that is faster than a balloon released into the wind. It can be done but most yachts will not achieve it. 3x the wind speed would be very impressive.

[David Cooper]

Sorry - I didn't read the original post carefully enough and my error was compounded by the second post which talks of the necessity of a keel (to stop the boat slipping sideways).

So, the question is much more interesting than I'd realised, and I don't know the answer. If these boats "tack" downwind (technically gybing) at 135 degrees to the wind they'll have to cover 1.41 times as much distance as the direct distance downwind, so they need a boat speed just a little higher than that, which sounds as if it may be possible. The fastest speed is probably achieved on a beam reach (at 90 degrees to the wind). There will be a range of angles and speeds in between those two which all need to be looked at, the speed of the boat reducing as the distance that needs to be covered comes down.

I don't know if this can be worked out through software. The best bet would be to send a question direct to the people who actually use the fastest kinds of boats to ask them, because they'll certainly know. Search terms to try to find a way to make contact: AC45, AC72, Extreme 40s, moth sailing dinghy. There is a complication with hydrofoils which I think make the boats faster downwind while slowing them down upwind.

Edit: And I now realise I'm still not answering the direct question which is about a boat going directly downwind, which should rule out zigzagging, though you could theoretically design a rig to zigzag while the boat under it goes directly downwind.

[graham.d]

Yes a Moth may be a good one. I have seen these go extremely quickly on their hydrofoils. They don't look easy to manage though! I have a relatively lumbering 35' keel boat; the hull length limits its speed to around 7 knots although in a really strong wind and a beam reach I have had a bit more.

It may well be possible to make headway downwind faster than the wind by tacking but probably not in a keel boat. A cat or hydrofoil would be much better but I don't know what could be achieved. It is hard to see how it could be achieved with the wind directly behind but maybe there could be some cunning variable keel design.

[yor_on (OP)]

Or turbines maybe, on a catamaran? If you can get it to lift, maybe? Wasn't there some very fast new Australian sailing boats? Don't remember where I read about them but they were really fast.

[David Cooper]

I'm beginning to doubt that it's possible. If you put a wind turbine on a boat, for example, the turbine will stop turning altogether as soon as the boat's up to the speed of the wind, and the turbine blades are essentially tacking downwind, so it looks as if a hot-air balloon flying just above the water will always win a race downwind against any kind of wind powered boat (or anything on land using wheels or skates). It's probably only by eliminating all friction with the ground that you can keep up with the balloon.

I've finally got round to looking at the link in the original post. I think the stuff about going downwind faster than the wind is all bogus. As soon as you reach the speed of the wind you lose all power, and from then on your turbine will do nothing but add to the drag - it's worse than a perpetual motion machine.

The next interesting question is how fast it can go upwind though, and maybe they've been putting out misinformation about downwind speed to make people think they're nutters so that they have a clear run to go for the upwind speed record without any competitors.

[imatfaal]

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/08/ddwfttw/all/1

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_fasterthanwind/

[yor_on (OP)]

I'm very proud of this thread, and will now make a statement.

It will work

Prove me wrong.
=

Damn Thought Wired said it was not possible Imatfaal? the obvious conclusion must be to not read wired ) We can make this one biiig too, if we just refuse those magazines. I got to admit that I really miss the plane on the conveyor belt. Had so much fun there.

[MarkV]

I think the stuff about going downwind faster than the wind is all bogus.

Gaunaa, Mac; Øye, Stig; Mikkelsen, Robert (2009). "Theory and Design of Flow Driven Vehicles Using Rotors for Energy Conversion". Marseille, France: Proceedings EWEC 2009.
http://orbit.dtu.dk/fedora/objects/orbit:55484/datastreams/file_3748519/content [nofollow]

"It is theoretically possible to build a wind
driven car that can go in the downwind
direction faster than the free stream wind
speed (using a propeller in the air)."

The next interesting question is how fast it can go upwind though

http://www.nalsa.org/ [nofollow]

"The NALSA Board of Directors has ratified the following two records achieved by Rick Cavallaro on New Jerusalem Airport near Tracy California on June 16, 2012, with the wind turbine driven sailing craft, Blackbird. Mr. Cavallaro achieved a maximum boat speed to wind speed ratio of 2.1:1 while sailing directly into the wind and a maximum speed in a wind turbine driven sailing craft of 22.9 mph on a different run.
On July 2, 2010 on El Mirage Dry Lake, Blackbird sailed directly down wind at a speed of 27.7 mph in a 10 mph wind to set a first record for the ratio of Boat Speed to true wind speed of 2.8. BlackBird was designed and built by the Thin Air Designs team (Rick Cavallaro and John Borton) and sailed by Rick."

[dlorde]

I've finally got round to looking at the link in the original post. I think the stuff about going downwind faster than the wind is all bogus. As soon as you reach the speed of the wind you lose all power, and from then on your turbine will do nothing but add to the drag - it's worse than a perpetual motion machine.

My understanding is that this is only true if your craft is free-wheeling (land) or floating free (water). In that case, you can only approach the speed of the wind because you're relying on the relative difference between your speed and the wind speed.

That's why the prop has to be coupled to the wheels for a land sailer and why you need a keel or similar device to couple a boat to the water. This way, you can use the relative difference in speed between the wind and the land or water to provide additional propulsion. For a boat, the keel doesn't just reduce sideways movement and yaw, but couples the sail to the water; the net result is much like shooting out a lemon pip by squeezing it between the fingers.

[graham.d]

Yes but look at the vectors in the lemon pip analogy. The maxium velocity is achieved when the direction of the force (wind) against the immovable, slippery plane (keel) are nearly at right angles. If you are pushing your pip (wind dierection) in the same direction as the slippery plane (keel) you only get the pip going as fast as you can push (as fast as the wind).

[MarkV]

Yes but look at the vectors in the lemon pip analogy. The maxium velocity is achieved when the direction of the force (wind) against the immovable, slippery plane (keel) are nearly at right angles. If you are pushing your pip (wind dierection) in the same direction as the slippery plane (keel) you only get the pip going as fast as you can push (as fast as the wind).

That's why conventional sailboats can outrun the wind only when sailing at an angle to the wind, not directly downwind. Here is the analogy to a squeezed wedge (lemon pip):

Note that the sail-craft outruns the air-mass along the directly downwind axis (downwind VMG > wind speed). Only ice-boats, land-yachts and the most efficient sailboats can achieve that ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_faster_than_the_wind#Speed_made_good [nofollow] ). They can beat a balloon to a directly downwind point, by tacking. On the DDWFTTW cart only the rotating propeller blades perform a long continuous tack, while the rest of the vehicle moves directly downwind, faster than the wind:

[David Cooper]

Thanks for finding all those fabulous links, people.

I was hoping I might somehow be wrong about this one, and fortunately it turns out that I was. If it's true that boats moving at perhaps 135 degrees to the wind make actual downwind progress faster than the wind (I don't know which angle's best), then the answer's very clear that they will be able to beat a balloon downwind. Eliminating the tacks (gybes) isn't particularly important as they can be made completely insignificant simply by making the course larger so that the turns take up an infinitesimal proportion of the time. In practice you'd need to do a lot of experiments to prove the point as wind speed can vary a lot on different parts of the course so you wouldn't be sure the boat wasn't picking up more wind than you were recording, but the statistics would soon add up to prove the point beyond reasonable doubt.

Unfortunately, it's hard to visualise the mechanism by which this can work, but the case where wheels are connected to a turbine is much easier to think your way around because it's easy to see where the power is tapped and how it is unleashed. I had been wondering how the wheels were connected to the turbine, but it appears to be a simple connection without variable gears, which fits in with the extremely slow acceleration: the wheels may initially hold the turbine back.

I had thought originally about the case of a turbine on a balloon. Because the balloon travels along at the speed of the wind, the turbine simply won't turn. What happens though if a wheel on a pole is lowered to the ground to try to pick up energy from the moving land below? You could have both a dynamo and a motor in the wheel: the dynamo generates power which you can then feed into the motor to power the wheel: the result will inevitably be drag, so the balloon will be slowed down, though if you could eliminate all friction there would neither be loss nor gain. That initially looks like the final say on the whole business, but it isn't. The balloon is sitting in moving air, so any power taken from the wheel can be sent to the turbine to make it serve as a propeller where it has a much better chance of tapping power out of air which is stationary relative to it than it would if the air was moving past the propeller at the same speed as the ground - putting the energy back into the wheel through a motor doesn't have that advantage, though there would be an equivalent if you had a long treadmill next to a road with the surface of the treadmill moving at the same speed as the balloon: you could then use two wheels, one with a dynamo in it tapping energy from the stationary road and the other with a motor in it putting out that power down onto the moving surface of the treadmill which is not moving relative to the balloon. That setup would be more efficient than the turbine and is a lot easier to get your head around.

Let's assume 100% efficiency. The wheel with the dynamo will generate drag, so there is a clear cost, but because we're assuming 100% efficiency we can put all the generated energy into the other wheel with the motor. If this wheel was also on the road, there would be no gain or loss for the balloon as it would directly cancel out all the drag caused by the dynamo, but of course the wheel with the motor isn't supposed to be on the road: it's going to be on the treadmill surface. If the balloon is moving at 10mph (the same speed as the wind and the treadmill surface), the energy captured from the wheel with the dynamo can be transferred to the wheel with the motor to make it try to run at 10mph on the treadmill surface. This will necessarily apply an acceleration force to the balloon - there's absolutely no doubt about it.

Suppose the balloon now reaches 15mph - we can design it to be shaped like an airship to reduce drag, so this should be possible. We now have the wheel with the dynamo moving at 15mph on the road and the wheel with the motor on the treadmill trying to go at 15mph to match, so we're clearly going to go on getting higher amounts of power generated all the time until the drag catches up with it and we hit a maximum speed.

If you could eliminate all friction, it looks as if it could go on accelerating without limit, continually tapping more and more energy from the difference in speed between the the ground and the treadmill surface. Imagine building two tracks in space with one moving at 10mph relative to the other. Now attatch a vehicle to both tracks using wheels which grip the tracks from two sides such that they are forced to remain in contact at all times. The wheels with the dynamo are initially rotating at 10mph because the vehicle can lock itself to the moving track to get up to that speed. Once at the speed of the moving track, the system is unlocked and the power generated in the dynamo is fed to the motor, thereby making the other wheels try to move at 10mph along the moving track. The result will soon be that we have a vehicle moving at 20mph with one set of wheels rotating at 20mph and another set of wheels rotating at 10mph and wanting to rotate faster. It does look as if it has to go on accelerating forever. In the real world, of course, there will be losses, but losses can be reduced for a long time, so the maximum speed will continue to creep up towards some theoretical maximum where it's impossible to improve the efficiency any further.

One thing puzzles me about the vehicle with the turbine though - my internet connection is too slow to watch the videos so the answer may be in those. To begin with when the vehicle is moving slower than the wind, the turbine is being blown round. Once the vehicle starts moving faster than the wind, the turbine is from that point on moving the wrong way to act as a propeller. How do they deal with that? I've checked this with a little turbine - when you blow it it turns anticlockwise, but if you power it anticlockwise it blows air away from you. Do they flip the blades to a different angle to get round this problem?

I now want to try to understand how a boat or ice/land yacht can make progress downwind faster than the wind, but it's going to be a lot harder to think through as it's not so easy to see energy being picked up from the water and then thrown out from the sail. I'll take my time and try to model this in my head too, but I don't expect to be able to crack it.

Their friendship started as an argument over an aerodynamics riddle that hinged on whether you could know the true direction of the wind while hang gliding without looking at the ground. (You can, though Cavallaro has never fully conceded the point.)

Looks as if another thread needs to be started on that.

[MarkV]

my internet connection is too slow to watch the videos so the answer may be in those.

You should really watch those first. This will spare you a lot of guesswork (pay attention to the blade angle vs. rotation).

The downwind runs:

The upwind runs:

If it's true that boats moving at perhaps 135 degrees to the wind make actual downwind progress faster than the wind

It is definitely true. Check the GPS measured vectors for an ice-boat on page 4:
http://www.nalsa.org/Articles/Cetus/Iceboat%20Sailing%20Performance-Cetus.pdf [nofollow]

I had been wondering how the wheels were connected to the turbine, but it appears to be a simple connection without variable gears, which fits in with the extremely slow acceleration: the wheels may initially hold the turbine back.

In the downwind case it is a propeller (turned by the wheels) all the time (below and above windspeed). In the upwind case it is a turbine (turning the wheels). The  slow acceleration in the downwind case is because the propeller creates a retarding force at the wheels, as it turns against the aerodynamic torque.

Once the vehicle starts moving faster than the wind, the turbine is from that point on moving the wrong way to act as a propeller.

The pitch and transmission are chosen such that it always acts as a propeller. Nothing changes at wind-speed about that.

Do they flip the blades to a different angle to get round this problem?

No. The prop pitch is always positive. On the prototype the pitch is even fixed, and it still accelerates from zero to  >2 windspeed.

I now want to try to understand how a boat or ice/land yacht can make progress downwind faster than the wind,

This might help:

but it's going to be a lot harder to think through as it's not so easy to see energy being picked up from the water and then thrown out from the sail.

You have to go the a reference frame that moves directly downwind faster than the wind, at the same speed as the downwind VMG of a boat going at TWA 135°. In this frame the boat slows down the moving water via keel, and accelerates the air via the sail. This frame is analogous to the rest frame of the DDWFTTW cart.