jmoorebeek

This sounds like a great proposal, and those 50-seat aircraft are the backbone of the mountain communities I grew up around in the PNW. Is there any loss in effectiveness in using standard atmospheric air (thanks to N2 and other non-oxygen components of air)? What do you do with the resultant H2O when the reaction is complete?

Feel free to contact us via our website, we'd certainly be interested to chat!

Feel free to reach out to us via our website, I'd be more than happy to keep this conversation going!

I'm practicing my fiddle skills, maybe by Series A I'll be ready for my soundcloud debut.

Lowering the sails will be critical to safe operation in bad weather. The deployment process will be easily reversible, so that within a few minutes you can go from full sail to fully stowed (or any place in between), likely with emergency settings to bring the sail down faster. We don't want to limit the weather a ship would sail in without diversion, but instead just make use of reasonable winds when they are present. We certainly will want to make future software for route planning assistance, but our first step will not require the ship to change course or speed to see benefits of the sails. It's certainly worth it over all to follow the wind, but for ease of adoption that can come later.

From our early investigations, many cargo ships already maintain sufficient moveable ballast (ie: water tanks) in order to handle dock operations, that they can also handle the roll moment from the sails. Maintenance is on our mind too. The possibility with a containerized solution is as easy as "ship it back to the manufacturer by putting a shipping label on it" for maintenance, and we can make sure to have spares dockside for our customers while their main device is being serviced.

Our current prototype is a 1/50 bench model using off-the-shelf tape measures. We're working on rapidly scaling that up to test on our Lido-14. I'm sure others will try to copy the concept, but as the comments have shown there will be quite a few engineering difficulties getting this from a bench prototype to production. As a startup rather than a legacy company, we are well situated to take on that difficult engineering task, whereas a larger company may shy away from it. We'd of course be happy to work with them to get this on a ship and de-risk the rest of the operations!

Yes, I can't say that we have absolutely everything figured out so far, but we have a decently complete model. Windage, changes to draught, and GM are already factored into our models at the root level, and while we may need to still tweak things we aren't waiting to be surprised by their effects.

I totally agree that route optimization takes on a whole different dimension now! For our early models and numbers, we're just benchmarking no change in route of speed, to really highlight the baseline benefits of sails. However, there are tremendous knock-on effects that would give you an advantage to follow the wind. We can make use of not only improved forecasting, but better satellite weather data and connectivity to ships to provide updates in real time. Altogether, there will be a lot of performance on the table that ships can take advantage of in the future.

I like the deeper sheath idea, but we moved away from that early on for a few reasons. A major one is cargo-handling, because you rapidly hit limits on how high the cranes can lift containers away from the deck. They can't start moving sideways until the entire container is free and clear, and if your container is too tall you may not even clear the stack before the crane reaches its upper limit. From a load management perspective, if you have the choice to go taller or wider, it's generally better to go wider. This also plays into the idea of using tape-spring rollers to store the sail material - it lends itself to being wider, rather than narrower. You can look in a few of our other comments below for more of a description, but yes, we plan to have load spreaders to reduce the compression load on any one stack, and tethers deployed to the main deck to provide additional tension restraints.

This is definitely a place where we think we can leverage modern automation processes. No need to add additional crew to manage the rigging, and the system should be able to manage itself safely.

While a container ship doesn't have a keel per-se, it does have about 200m of flat plate length sticking into the water. At small angles, that flat plate can actually have a decent lift to drag ratio. Historic sailing vessels also made do without a modern wing-keel, so our current plan is that the container ship can crab into the wind by less than a degree to produce all of the side force required to maintain a steady course.

We actually plan to go a step further, and power these containers from an internal battery pack. We can then recharge the pack passively when deployed (small wind turbine or solar). Of course we can optionally hook up to ship power if it's available, but we're planning for the case where it is not. As you say, the power to operate these devices should not impose a large electrical load.

We agree that a permanent installation would be awesome, but we came across some difficulties with that idea in customer conversations. First is the number of containers you permanently displace might mean you never recover your investment. Having a removable solution allows you to access the containers under the sail without any difficulty at the port. A permanent solution also requires time in a shipyard to install the foundations and mechanisms. There are thousands of ships out there which will need retrofits, and shipyards are already struggling with capacity, so a solution which you can build inland, then ship to and rapidly install at a dock makes sense to us.

We're looking at steel partly for durability, but also if we're going to be rolling up the sails a lot then fatigue limits become a lot more important. Cost is key too - I'd love to make this from CF, but price goes way up.

For load sensors, we're thinking strain gauges and pressure sensors to measure wing surface pressure and use that for live feedback. Anemometers might be mounted on the top of the wing, but more likely we'll use a master anemometer at the bridge to send info to the entire array.

For the wing shape, we're currently looking at a symmetric airfoil with fixed ribs inside for strength, so not able to actively change the camber, but we are looking at the ability to do wing warping to change the overall shape of the wing. We are still working to get our first data from on the water, so no good answers on the trim other than we want to make this as automatic and turnkey for the ship master as possible. We're quite early in the design still, though, so don't yet know where the limits of the technology are. Likewise, no answers on BOM and sourcing for you. However, we do plan to start hiring after our seed raise, so feel free to contact us through our website!

I agree, the roll moments are a huge design challenge! We're looking at multiple avenues to bring those loads down to the deck: - The double wide container already has a longer lever arm to provide righting moment - We plan to incorporate load spreaders (similar to a crane) which can further extend the footprint to the adjacent container stacks - We are designing in tethers which automatically drop down to the deck level and get lashed down by a deckhand during installation, which provide additional tension support.

Bailey has written a routing software which we use to send virtual ships on crossings (for instance Trans Pacific), incorporating historical weather data. Even with no change in route or vessel speed, we can see benefits.

From our first analysis, applying the thrust through the container seems doable; the containers are secured to each-other and the ship via mechanical "twistlocks", which are designed to handle not just ship loads, but also trucking loads (such as a 2g hard braking from a semi). The roll loads are actually the more difficult design challenge.

Regarding kites, we looked at those quite a bit. The challenge with those is that kites tend to be best for when the wind is coming from behind you or crosswind. For a container ship traveling at high speed, the kites would act more as a parachute and slow you down (even if you were extracting energy from them).

Of course, there will be limits on the wind speed the structure can handle. Flexing of the structure will be designed in, similar to how a 787 wing flexes by design under load. For stronger gusts, aside from design margin, we are also looking at technologies that can help us see gusts coming, for instance LIDAR systems which are already used on ships which can detect windspeeds for kilometers around the vessel. We can then reef or feather the sails when we see a gust coming and remain within structural limits.

Not yet. Our first prototype is a bench model without the necessary structure to handle full loads. We're working on the detailed design to get on the water now.