Float a wind generator on helium baloons.

[Marco]

I idea popped into my head like some sort of anti-paricle that

had just burst into existance. I was actually making lentil soup

at the time.

Would it be possible to have the wind turbine suspened from a couple of large helium baloons. The turbine would then only need to be tied to the ground by three ground ropes (say lightweihgt nylon lines). Mounting points would have to be rotatable so no support wires got tangled.

Voila, no structure to support. I don't think you would need too big a helium baloon to do this.

Anyone fancy calculating how much helium would be needed to lift an 8ft wind

turbine?

I am going away to take my medicine!!!

Marco Miglionico

[richhagen]

You would add a continuing cost of having to continually resupply your helium that you would lose due to effusion.  Your balloons would have to be large to lift the power cables as well as the turbine and any supporting cableing.  In general, I think it would cost much more in the long run.  Rich

[BT Humble]

You would add a continuing cost of having to continually resupply your helium that you would lose due to effusion.  Your balloons would have to be large to lift the power cables as well as the turbine and any supporting cableing.  In general, I think it would cost much more in the long run.  Rich

Why use Helium?  You could have a tank of water at the base of each balloon using some of your generated electricity to produce hydrogen, with a tube running up into the balloon.

Hydrogen would be much more spectacular in a lighting storm, too! :-D

BTH

(Yes, I think it sounds like a silly idea too.  But then, look at some of the things I do...)

[hvirtane]

I was just thinking about

suggesting hot air instead

of helium, when I read

about hydrogen...

- Hannu

[fungus]

Hydrogen's lighter than helium as well so you'll need less of it.

[pyrocasto]

But smaller, it would sneak out of your ballon faster. Go to bed, and wake up with your mill on the ground.

[John II]

Hi I like the idea.... I want some sucker to try it : )

I can solve one problem:

Use a wind gennie with an output of 400 volts or more. 3 phase.

Now you have 3 anchor cables... get the idea : ) With high enough voltages you could come down with very little loss with stainless steel or even galvanize cables. At the ground use a 3 phase transformer to get you back to the voltage you want.

I'll give it a try with proper funding from everyone : ) <joke>

John II

[zubbly]

hello Marco!

actually, i love the idea!

i have discussed this a couple times on the irc chat.

John II says he needs a sucker to try it out. so then lets have a sucker race!  

i hope to try it out sometime this comming summer.  small scale only to see what happens. perhaps a 1/4hp conversion with a 1 meter prop  (lots of wind up there)

by the way, i just love lentil soup!

have fun!,  thats what its all about!

the wright bros were thought nuts also.  lol!

zubbly

[electrondady1]

love the visionary stuff , i store all my hydrogen in  giant baloons. they help to support the giant inflateable vawts.

[cdog]

magenn.com

[alterfuels]

A problem that you will come up with is keeping the balloon sationary!  High winds which are wanted for mills also will blow the balloons down at an angle!  Its a great idea but think it will have many problems in the application stage!  Good luck to all that try and report your success' back!  Jason

[Don Cackleberrycreations]

You would have to use a mylar ballon

both helium and hydrogen permiate through common latex ballons forming a very thin layer of gas . In helium this is just accepted , with hydrogen this is explosive air traveling around or water (rain)  falling on a hydrogen ballon creates enough static to cause an explosion . for a 200 pound genny with cables your looking at a min or 3 16ft Diameter ballons (rough guesstimate under the assumtion a 16ft weather ballong will lift 135#s)  with that much area catching the wind the genny is not going to stay in one place . in hugh winds you anchor cable will cause the set up to be on the ground.

the Orginal concept was to have floating platforms of generators and place them near the Jet streams . using induction or micro wave transfer the power to the ground.  the idea first came to life in the early 1920s and was revisited a number of times 40s,50s 60s and as late as the 1990s. popular science has done a number of stories on this idea . Sounds neat until you attempt to figure in practicality.

[BT Humble]

A problem that you will come up with is keeping the balloon sationary!  High winds which are wanted for mills also will blow the balloons down at an angle!

Hmm, Jalbert (the fellow who invented the parafoil) also invented a device he called the "Kytoon".  Basically it was a helium blimp with extended kite-like wings so that it was steerable (from the ground) and didn't get pushed back to the ground in high winds.  That should ensure a nice stable altitude:

http://www.drachen.org/about_archive_jalbert.html

BTH

[RP]

"But smaller, it would sneak out of your ballon faster. Go to bed, and wake up with your mill on the ground."

No, Hydrogen comes as H2.  The molecule is larger than Helium H1 and will diffuse slower through the wall.

[electrondady1]

cdog, there beautiful! attach one to a boat. fly or float, we never pay property tax again

[Speo]

That's a benefit, not a problem. It will be a kind of "furling" system.

High winds will push the baloon down to lower winds.

High winds will let the baloon to go up to higher winds.

[Speo]

I mean:

High winds will push the baloon down to lower winds.

Lower winds will let the baloon to go up to higher winds.

[hobot]

Location Location or plain elevation.

Here's more concepts on flying wind generators

Google Link

There are aircraft hazzards to consider and the land area mill could

fall on that would have to be resvered for this.

 hobot

[hobot]

oopp the google link didn't copy over so here's the

link with it active

http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/8/16/11929/4097

[georgeodjungle]

how about using the hydrogen plumbing also, for, power cables.

hydrogen up, power delivery down.

ya ya:

and a anchor to.

got to hold the darn thing down.

just pinched in the #s.

my calculator said it would take a lot.

it is a cartoon world after all.

[pyrocasto]

Ahh forgot about that. Still it would sneak out, and you'd have to have a constant supply of hydrogen. Who knows, maybe it's doable, but we'll never know until some of you mess around with it. ;-)

Also cant forget, the higher the baloon gets, the less it can hold up.

[thefinis]

Here is a website for lift from different gases and sizes of balloons

www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/lift.html

A word of caution. The price of the balloon and the helium needed to lift 200 lbs is really really high. If you use hydrogen extreme care needs to be used to keep air from mixing with it. It is explosive when mixed with oxygen much safer when kept isolated.

I like that floating rotating generator will have to think on it for a while.

There is one more choice for lift that I have looked at but at the time was considering it for a floating habitat. An airtight sphere if LARGE enough does not need much reduction in air pressure to float. Even relatively smaller spheres if evucated to a good vacumn provide more lift per volumn than hydrogen. The drawback is of course the weight of the sphere itself compared to balloons etc for the light gases.

Finis

[Dan M]

No comment on the feasibility, but here are the numbers (I think) to calculate the size of your balloons:

Air weighs about 1.25 kg/cu m

Helium weighs about 4 g/mole, or 4 grams per 22.4L (assuming ideal gas properties)

at 1000L per cu m this converts to about 0.18 kg/cu m.

Hydrogen weighs about 1 g/mole, or 1 gram per 22.4L

at 1000L per cu m this converts to about 0.045 kg/cu m

So:

Helium will "lift" about 1.25 - 0.18 or 1.07 kg for each cubic meter of volume

Hydrogen will "lift" about 1.25 - 0.045 or 1.2 kg for each cubic meter of volume

If hydrogen is diatomic (H2) the the hydrogen number becomes 1.16kg of lift per cu m.

Somebody please do a sanity check on these numbers and let me know if they're all wet.

Have Fun,

-Dan M

[JohnC]

It would be possible.  You could reduce the drift in high winds using offset airfoils, very simmular to using planer boards for fishing from shore. When you adjust the offset of the boards,(airfoil) to water current, this causes the board or again here the balloon to fight to be 90 degrees.

John

[asheets]

Even a 500millibar constant pressure altitude, heavy lift meteorology balloon has an expected liftetime of about 5 days.  UV kills thems pretty quick.

South Dakota has a plan for lifting cell phone transponders using these things -- they figure about 7 days to drift from one end of the state to the other before either a controlled letdown by chute or fatigue burst.

Personally, this summer I'm planning on lifting a static longwire and pipe into a capacitor bank.  I plan on recreating Ben Franklin's turkey cooking experiments

[asheets]

I don't have my meteorological instrumentation books with me, but the numbers prima facie sound about right.

What I remember about the subject was that we filled radiosonde balloons with a specific amount of He so that the balloon would maintain a constant height with a known payload.  Then we would remove the test payload and replace with the lighter (but still known weight) sonde unit.  In theory, the climb rate is then a known logarithmic (though in the real world, it was fairly constant -- which is a good thing if you have to track it with a manual theodolite instead of with RADAR).  

If we launched a constant height balloon, we'd adjust the weight/He ratio until we could get it close to predicted altitude, launch it, and let an onboard computer dump either helium or ballast to keep it as close to 500mb as possible.  

[SparWeb]

Use a kite instead of a balloon!

If there's wind to turn the turbine, there's wind to loft the kite!

Anti-torque and gust reactions would require some simple automatic controls.

Once aloft, the wind-mill blades would provide lift, or downward thrust, if allowed to pitch down...

The power you draw from the wind creates a proportional drag force that pulls the kite down, but that's a limitation that applies to the balloon, too.