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Wind TransportA Brief History of Wind Transport | Further Information | ReferencesA Brief History of Wind TransportThe most common form of using the wind to power transportation technologies is the sailing boat. Sailing is the skillful art of controlling the motion of a sailing ship or smaller boat across a body of water. Sailing vessels are propelled by the force of the wind on sails. Today, for most people, sailing is recreation, an activity pursued for the joy of being on the water and pursuing the mastery of the skills needed to manoeuver a sailboat in varying sea and wind conditions. The force of the wind is used to create motion by using one or more sails. When sailing downwind (away from the wind source) the vessel's motion is derived from the simple force of the wind pushing the sail. When sailing upwind (towards the wind source) the movement of air over the sails acts in the same way as air moving over an aircraft's wing. Air flowing over the sail generates lift. This pulls the sail (and the boat) ahead, but also pushes it downwind rather strongly. 
Figure 1 Traditional sailing off the northern coast of Mozambique.
A common modern use of wind transportation is yachting. A yacht (from Dutch jacht meaning "hunt") was originally defined as a light, fast sailing vessel used to convey important persons. In later parlance, the definition came to cover a wider range of vessels, propelled by sail, power or both and used for pleasure cruising and/or racing. Until the 1950s almost all yachts were made of wooden boards, or in a larger yacht, steel but nowadays there a much wider range of materials is used. Most common is fibreglass, but steel, aluminium and much less often because of insurance difficulties, ferrocement are used as well. Wood is still used (traditional board based methods as well as modern technologies based on plywood, veneers and epoxy-glues etc.) but wood is mostly used when building an individual boat by a hobbyist or wooden boat purist. At the other extreme, high performance yachts such as those used in the Volvo Ocean Race and the America's Cup are often constructed from carbon fibre (Wikipedia, 2007). 
Figure 2 Sailboat "Ferdinand" on charter in the British Virgin Islands
(courtesy of Caribbean Crewed Charter Yacht Ferdinand) Modern yachts have efficient sail plans that allow them to sail into the wind. This capability is the result of a sail plan and hull design (typically a sloop rig) that utilises Bernoulli's principle to generate lift. Further InformationRISE Resources - Information regarding available renewable energy resources.RISE Technologies - An extensive collection of information regarding renewable energy technologies.RISE Applications & System Design - Renewable energy application information and system designs.RISE System Displays - Case studies and information on installed renewable energy systems & performance data.
ReferencesWikipedia, 2007. “Yacht” (Online) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht (Accessed 23 February 2007). |
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