These were my old days, I just joined the NOVU (Dutch Association of Inventors) and I was still learning everything. May be this is still the case now but I have at least 11 years more of experience at a normal company. Which I left by the way since a few weeks to start making and selling innovative business concepts.
Okay, I would like to share with you my presentation before the jury and other guests in a nice place called Chateau St. Gerlach.
I was number 5 or 6 of in total 7 nominees so had enough time to reach my full nervous potency. I started as follows:
A brief outline of the TransKite
My name is Friedhelm Veldhuijzen and together with mr. Niessen we think our proposal demonstrates the advantages of the Dyneema fibre in a comprehensive way namely the cable and the textile aspect.
We're talking about a kite. In your childhood everybody of you will have played with kites. Small kites of about a halve square meter but you have felt the kite pulling.
Nowadays some adults are still playing with kites. They sit in buggies on the beach and a kite is pulling them from The Hague to Katwijk. A small town 15 km ahead. And if they are lucky the wind turns and pull them back too. They use kites of about 6 square meter. A very popular sport of the last summer is kite surfing. Instead a sail they use the kite to jump on the waves.
Ok, let's imagine a bit bigger kite. A kite as big as a soccer field. This is about 4000 square meter. This huge kite will pull quite strong, about 40 tons. You can pull up a herd of 16 hippos (Nijlpaarden)! [Now they laughed, this must have been the crucial sentence.] But we don't want to pull up hippos but we want energy. How do we get energy with this kite?
To keep it in form we use the wind and some tubes filled with helium, so it can never drop down. The kite which textile should be armed with Dyneema fibres is connected to a ground station with a lightweighted very strong cable, a Dyneema cable. [The story had to be a sort of promo of course.]
This ground station is equipped with two generators which will generate electricity as the kite is moving with the wind for let's say a kilometre. A low estimation of the power is about 250 Watt per square meter. (A big wind turbine has about 600 Watt per square meter). So, with this 250 we get with our soccer field kite a power of 1 MW! This is comparable with the bigger wind turbines. [Yes, it was in the old days.]
The kite is equipped with an apparatus that changes the lift of the kite. In doing so the power to get the kite back after this kilometre is very low, almost zero. In this stage the generators have the function of two electro engines and get their electricity from the net or from a similar machine in the same area.
The ground station is dimensioned to handle this high forces and to discharge them to the soil. In the construction itself there will be no torsions, only forces parallel to the construction part. This enables a lighter and cheaper construction. All forces are discharged to the generators to spin them around and from there to the soil. So the cable will put on the reel with no tensions.
In the cable and textile of this TransKite the application of the Dyneema fibre is of course very suitable because of its strength and weight.
Finally the advantages of the TransKite compared to the usual wind turbines:
1) no mast
2) no sky line pollution (transparent kite)
3) using less turbulent wind currents (higher efficiency)
4) no resulting torsion forces
5) less ground neccessary
6) more power per installation possible
7) safer
8) flexible to wind forces
The TransKite (the transversal movement of the kite) is an idea which should be implemented as soon as possible. Thank you for your attention.
At that time our astronaut Wubbo Ockels was busy with this LadderMill. I was happy to answer one question afterwards with the advantages of our TransKite over Wubbos LadderMill (one single line is much better than two lines because two lines can contort and damage the whole thing). And Wubbo agreed since his current LadderMill is not a laddermill anymore but a normal kite.
Now I am thinking that controlling the kite lift is too critical a thing. A textile wind turbine pulled up by a kite up to 5 km which is just rotating might be a better option. Magenn is already busy with a sort of floating Savonius. And as you know Savonius turbines are not the most efficient turbines. But thats for another blog.
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