Technical design

Concept

The Alcyone

In 1980, Jacques Cousteau dreamed of creating a address with a avant-garde engine that would be powered, at atomic in part, by the wind, a clean, free, renewable activity source. The abstraction of application a hollow, alternating metal butt for propulsion, the Flettner rotor, had been approved and alone decades afore Cousteau and a aggregation of engineers absitively to animate and advance on it.

editAerodynamics

Cousteau and his associates, Professor Lucien Malavard and Dr. Bertrand Charrier, acclimated a anchored butt that looked like a automated and functioned like an aeroplane wing.

It consists of an airfoil, vertical and grossly ovoidal tube, with a adaptable accessory which improves the break amid the intrados and extrados. An aspiration arrangement pulls air into the tubes, and is acclimated to actualize an important abasement on one ancillary of the sail; propulsion occurs perpendicularly to the pressure. In this way, the "sails" act as wings, with air affective slower on one side, creating drag.

A adaptable bang and arrangement of fan-drawn aspiration bigger the ability of this new sail. Small-scale models activated in a wind adit functioned perfectly, and the Turbosail was born.

As a aftereffect of this design, the turbosail assets its a lot of altered characteristic: advance is accessible for the administration of travel, behindhand of wind direction. A address able with turbosails can accomplish advance even into a headwind, accepting activity from cogwheel burden created by the bound amphitheater both central and alfresco the sail.

Standard engines can again be acclimated in affiliation with the turbosails. These in about-face can be accommodating with computers to ascendancy the angles, assimilation power, and circling of the sails.

editEngineering analysis

When compared to the advance accessory of the best sails anytime congenital (Marconi or aboveboard types, i.e. ships of the America's Cup or the Japanese wind propulsion system) that of the Turbosail is 3.5 to 4 times above and gives the arrangement a altered advantage for the economical propulsion. This amount is the aftereffect of analysis on the Alcyone.

The ability of the arrangement has about not been subjected to acceptable allusive engineering research. There accept been alone two turbosail able argosy on which alive analysis has been performed. The Cousteau accumulation is the alone organisation with a ample physique of abstracts accessible on turbosails.

The Alcyone appear a 1/3 ammunition savings, and a beyond bartering barge had a 15% access in ammunition ability over a three year abstraction (see "external links" for references).

The arrangement bears similarities with Anton Flettner's Rotorschiff, a altered architecture based on the Magnus effect.