This is amazing. Man have we gone backwards. Check out the elegance of this car made in 1973. That is what needs to be reinvented for the X prize.
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1970s Jim turned his attention to sail design, inventing new rigs for small sailboats that greatly increased their efficiency. When his then teenage son, Douglas, asked him to design an iceboat, Jim dreamed up a vessel of extraordinary beauty and astonishing aeronautical potential that attained speeds 4.3 times the speed of the wind.
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Sailing craft "create" their own wind when they start moving.
With proper sail design, trim & a low resistance hull (or chassis), the faster you go, the more apparent wind your sails "see". If you take advantage of the increasing apparent wind speed by trimming the sails (and/or adjusting your heading - because the apparent wind direction also changes), you can just keep creating more apparent wind and more acceleration (up to a point).
An optimized sail, well trimmed, on an optimized low resistance hull (hydrofoil, in this case) can do amazing things... like this:
Needless to say, I'm into sailing. I can't count how many times I've thought it would be great, silly fun to mount a sail on the Blackfly and see what happens.
Felicia - '09 Toyota Prius Base 90 day: 52.44 mpg (US)
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It's all about the angle. You can achieve the highest speeds when the wind is actually coming from right angles to your desired direction of travel. You start out with your sail angled a little bit, acting like a wing sticking straight up. The wind lifts your sail/wing forward. As you gain speed, you trim the sail to keep its angle of attack from becoming neutral to the new "perceived" wind that the sail sees.
I saw this funky car in a 1980's Popular Science. It was on the cover.
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Does this same technology apply to vehicles with no ambient wind?
EG - car moves forward, 'sails' get wind, car moves faster forward. but if the car holds still it sees there is actually no wind when it is not moving.
How on earth do you get your vehicle to do faster then the power that is propelling it? I need to do more research on this, very nice post.
the same way that a sail boat can go faster then the wind, and the same way that the tip of a wind turbine can go faster then the speed of sound (was a problem with some exprimental turbines), it works because insted of working as a drage device (cup getting pulled with the wind) it's working as an air foil, simaler to a kite, sail, propeller or wing, they are all air foils.
the book New Electric Vehicle, has a chaptor on an air foil car that is simaler, it has a horse shoe shaped wing.
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