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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 22 2017, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the spin-me-a-tale dept.

Over 200 years after steamships first began crossing the ocean, wind power is finding its way back into seafaring. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning "rotor sails" to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions. The company behind the technology, Finnish firm Norsepower, says this is the first retrofit installation of a wind-powered energy system on a tanker.

Yet the idea of using these spinning cylinders on ships to generate thrust and drive them forward was first trialled in 1924 – and shortly after disregarded. So why do Norsepower and Maersk (and the UK government, which is providing most of the £3.5m of funding), think this time the technology will be more of a success?

The rotor sail was invented by German engineer Anton Flettner. It is effectively a large, spinning metal cylinder that uses something called the Magnus effect to harness wind power and propel a ship.

How does it work?

When wind passes the spinning rotor sail, the air flow accelerates on one side and decelerates on the opposite side. This creates a thrust force that is perpendicular to the wind flow direction. Although it takes energy in the form of electricity to spin the sail, the thrust it produces means the engines can be significantly throttled back, so it reduces overall fuel use and emissions.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:26PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:26PM (#482766)

    The chances are low that a suitable wind would be available to propel a ship at anything like that speed, constructed like that.

    You can get extremely fast sailing vessels, but they're as far on the bleeding edge of materials science and dynamics as, say, Formula 1 cars.

    Tankers don't travel as fast as the Queen Mary. They cruise at (depending on various factors) somewhere between 15 and 20 knots, with oil prices playing a role in how fast they cruise.

    The big problem with the spinning cylinder approach is that you can't trim it (other than reversing direction), so you're dependent on a suitable wind, after the added vector of induced wind, to be useful, and that's hard to guarantee. However, if you have a wind that is, after induced wind, off your beam, then it can be useful, but given that the net wind will only be off your beam less than half the time, the real world usefulness of this remains to be seen.

  • (Score: 2) by massa on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:34PM

    by massa (5547) on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:34PM (#482772)

    20 knots = 37 km/h according to Google.

  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by massa on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:01PM (2 children)

    by massa (5547) on Wednesday March 22 2017, @04:01PM (#482792)

    QM2's maximum speed is 30 knots and cruising speed is 26 knots, not mph (not a large difference)

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @05:49PM (#482847)

      Knot a large difference.
      ftfy

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @07:40PM (#482908)

      30 knots = 35 mph.