Solar Boat To Cross the Atlantic 190
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.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Filtering out submitters? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:$500k is hardly mainstream (Score:2, Interesting)
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 it.
KFG
Re:Won't work on monohulls (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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.