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Solar Boat To Cross the Atlantic
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Sep 17, 2006 05:45 PM
from the sun-and-sea dept.
from the sun-and-sea dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes, "A group from Switzerland will soon attempt the first Atlantic crossing in a solar-powered boat. This ship, named SUN21, is a 14-meter-long catamaran able to sleep 5 or 6 persons. The goal is to leave Seville, Spain, in December 2006 and to reach ports in Florida and New York in the spring of 2007. This boat will achieve its 7,000-mile trip at a speed of 5-6 knots, about the speed of a sailing yacht, by using photovoltaic cells and without burning a single gallon of fuel. The consortium behind this project wants to demonstrate that the time has come for solar boats." The boat will cost about $556,000 to build and it will be for sale at some point after its crossing.
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Been Done Already (Score:5, Insightful)
Catboats with sails makes a very reliable clip night and day with little or no fancy technology - and can easily be mated up to such a solar-panel system for an added kick and redundancy...
$500k is hardly mainstream (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd have serious concerns about reliability etc. too. Consider that many sailing adventures end up with broken masts and similar misfortunes that people are able to recover from because they're using ancient technology. They can put together something that sails from broken masts and torn sails etc and limp in to port. Fixing up broken PV is probably not something you can just do armed with a hammer, saw and a knife.
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When I can I even like to avoid winches and wire rigging. Ropes, block and tackle may fail slightly more often, but they're easier to handle and easier to create jury rigs out of when the shit hits the sails.
Wire's for racers and dock sailors. Quite frankly, if you really need wire just to hold your mast up you've fucked up your engineering.
PV's good for a bit of luxury now and again, but I would never ever bet my life at sea on i
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They're not changing away from sailing vessels now, the whole industry changed over 100 years ago. They are using a solar-powered, propellor driven vessel which - if the tachnology advances - will have many quite obvious advantages over traditional sailing vessels.
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Yes, but modern sailing vessels have many quite obvious advantages over photovoltaic, as well as over traditional sailing vessels. Sailing technology hasn't stood still in the last hundred years, you know. Sailing vessels are faster - a lot fa
why? (Score:2)
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. As many people here have pointed out, sailboats have been around for a very long time, meaning that we've had a lot of time to improve their design and construction. If the first generation of a solar ship can be competitive with current generation sailboats, I think that this bodes well for the solar ship in the long haul.
3. Owing to the enormous forces involved in propelling a large ship using wind, the design, construction and operation of sailing vessels can be quite expensive. Half a million for a boat that can cross the Atlantic doesn't seem so bad, especially for a first-generation custom-built effort. With large scale production, I would expect to see prices come down.
4. The masts, sails and standing rigging of a sailing vessel seem incompatible with modern top-loading cargo facilities, whereas I can imagine that a solar boat could be designed for compatibility with existing port equipment.
5. Although batteries weigh a lot, so does fuel. And, unlike cars and trucks driving cross-country, ships crossing an ocean don't have the luxury of refueling, so they have to carry it all with them. On a solar-powered ship, you just need enough battery capacity to get you through cloudy patches.
I'm not 100% convinced it'll work, but the idea has merit.
Parent
Make a huge trimaran, and sure! (Score:3, Insightful)
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To show that it can be done on solar alone (Score:2)
It's a proof of technology, not a planned usurper to sail power, at least that's how I see it.
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What if solar and sail were not concurrent? (solar for sunny days and no wind)
What if the solar panels primary purpose was to store energy to run on-board systems and for docking?
There are many iterations here, but it's an idea worth pursuit. (I think)
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Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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sailboats themselves use solar, and sometimes even a mini wind turbine to keep their electronic systems charged while saving gas for real emergencies.
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Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
The North Atlantic is one of the most hostile environments on earth
---and they plan to make the crossing in January on solar power at a speed of 5 knots?
This is nuts.
Parent
But how much oil... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But how much oil... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
The economics always prove it (Score:2)
But how much oil did it take to make the solar cells?
Certainly no more than some percentage of its wholesale cost (cost of manufacturing includes cost of materials, energy, labor, and lots of other things like marketing, licensing fees, etc.) Panels usually pay back their RETAIL cost in a few years (depends on the area you are in, if you use a tracking mount which grossly increases their daily output, etc.) There's a substanial net gain, since they easily last another decade past their break-even point
Honey, where's the spare paddle? (Score:3, Insightful)
But the important question is ... (Score:2)
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What's next? (Score:2)
Useless (Score:2)
Its not like they're sucking the well dry everyday.
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Also is there any numbers on whether or not you could cover a giant tanker-like ship with enough solar panels to get it to move at an acceptable speed?
Time is money... (Score:2)
Well, I guess it is an improvement over Kon-Tiki [wikipedia.org] which only had an ave speed of 1.5 knots. But at least it didn't use all this new-fangled technology!
If transportation advancement followed CPU speed or Disk Drive storage - whoa nelly! We'd be burning our nads off, zipping around!
Solar? (Score:2)
Filtering out submitters? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article: (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for all the nuclear powered ships and submarines.
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And if you really want to be picky, ships don't burn gasoline. They use diesel fuel.
Dan East
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Obligatory Monty Python (Score:3, Funny)
The camera has come to rest on a very obvious isolated beach hut; it blows up. Cut to a building site in a suburban housing estate. There is a Gumby standing there.
Voice Over And here is the neighbour who told us where they were (he blows up) Nobody likes a clever dick. (cut to stock film of a small house) Here is where he lived (it blows up) And this is where Lord Langdon lived who refused to speak to us (it blows up). So did the gentleman who lived here....(shot of house: it blows up)... and here
Cut to a presentation desk. The film is on a screen behind. We see it stop behind him as the presenter speaks.
Presenter Ah, well I'm afraid we have to stop the film there, as some of the scenes which followed were of a violent nature which might have proved distressing to some of our viewers. Though not to me, I can tell you.
(cut to another camera; the presenter turns to face it,)
In Nova Scotia today, Mr Roy Bent of North Walsham in Norfolk became the first man to cross the Atlantic on a tricycle. His tricycle, specially adapted for the crossing, was ninety feet long, with a protective steel hull, three funnels, seventeen first-class cabins and a radar scanner. (A head and shoulders picture of Roy Bent comes up on the screen behind him) Mr Bent is in our Durham studios, which is rather unfortunate as we're all down here in London. And in London I have with me Mr Ludovic Grayson, the man who scored all six goals in Arsenal's 1-0 victory over the Turkish Champions FC Botty. (he turns) Ludovic... (pull out to reveal that he is talking to a five-foot-high filing cabinet) first of all, congratulations on the victory.
Mr Grayson (from inside filing cabinet) Thank you, David.
Anyway, very silly stuff, you get the point.
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode24.htm#11 [ibras.dk]
Perfect! (Score:2)
You run into a dark, cloudy storm, and lose power. And the worse the storm is, the less chance you have of developing any power. For some reason, that doesn't sound like much more than a one-off gimmick to me.
Yes, you could store energy in batteries, but storing enough power to get that boat very far in storm winds means a LOT of weight, which means a lower draft, more resisitance, and the need for more panels....
steve
Hybrid (Score:3, Insightful)
Dan East
???? uh time for what (Score:3, Insightful)
anything but mainstream.
Nice idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
It sounds nice, but the practical application for the actual transportation of goods is something else.
The great things about ships is that the volume increases as a cubic function (roughly) of the length, but the drag only increases as the square. The area available to solar energy is more like a direct linear relationship to length what with ships being kind of long and skinny. That means that you can eventually build a ship big enough to carry it's own fuel to cross an ocean, and if you go bigger it can carry cargo even. Bigger still means more cargo with less fuel per cargo needed (generally). This is why we now have 1000 foot long container ships and 300,000 DWT ULCCs (Ultra Large Crude Carriers). But these ships that require less energy per volume still require a *lot* of energy, and not just energy, put power too (they need that energy fast). For example, the ship I work on (600 feet long by 75 feet wide, about 20,000 GRT--small by today's standards) requires about 14,000 horsepower to travel at about 17 knots when fully loaded. Just using a crude area approximation for the ship's dimensions and, say, 33% efficiency for solar cells you would get about 1630 kW of power, or about 2180 horsepower. 2180 horsepower won't even move a ship that size fast enough to maintain steerage. This isn't even mentioning the other auxiliary electrical loads associated with a ship (pumps, motors, air conditioning, sewage processing, etc.). Factoring average load for my ship in to that, you get about 1000 kW (1350 HP) available for propulsion. This is like trying to row a canoe with a spoon. Of course, if you don't put anything in the ship power consumption goes way down and you eventually get to the point where you have a boat like what they're using. But what business that makes money by moving lots of goods from A to B on a schedule is going to build a fleet of boats that can't carry anything and go very slowly? Maybe recreational boaters, but I don't see it so much for the commercial shipping industry.
I do wish them fair winds and following seas for their crossing, and hope that they are indeed correct that "Solar energy will be the future of navigation techniques" if for no other reason than we need to, as a society, start reducing out carbon footprint. As an engineer (a marine engineer, at that), though, I see a very long a tortuous path ahead.
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Price out a nice new Sea Ray Sundancer, last I checked their Sundancer 460 (roughly 46' of real space, like 51' tip to tip) model runs between half and three quarters of a Meg.
That said, I like the earlier idea of making the sails out of solar collector material (memories of Tron come to mind) and using that juice to fill up the batteries, run those the massive electric motors like this thing does.
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So, Solar loses, wind wins!
Good ol' `wind'. Nothin' beats that...