Windmill ship
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A windmill ship is a ship which moves itself by a windmill connected to the propeller. Windmill ships should not be confused with rotor ships, as they do not rely on the Magnus effect for propulsion. Rather, like regular windmills they only use direct wind power.[1] This direct windpower is mechanically transferred and not electrically (like with windturbines), allowing the force to be transferred to the propeller without conversion losses. In windmill hybrid boats, electrical conversion of the power is nonetheless done when the energy can not be used inmediatelly and needs to be stored.
Points of sail
Due to the fact that a windmill can rotate 360°, a windmill ship can [2][3]
Types
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Several types can be made; these include windmill-only ships [4], windmill/rotorsail ships[5] aswell as hybrid ships which store wind power from the windmill when the ship does not need to be propelled. Often the boats are equipped with low-friction hull designs (eg multihulls, ...) or they are foreseen of hydrofoils, which reduces the energy required to propell the boat. Boats without low-friction hulls or hydrofoils can be equipped with windmills, but often the force generated by the windmills alone is not sufficient to propel the craft. In this case, the windmills only provide supplemental force to the rotors. At present, research is still going on and the best types of bladed rotors still needs to be determined. For example, high horizontal axis wind mills are proven to make the ship less stable. Therefore, vertical axis wind mills (eg Savonius turbines, ...) are sometimes preferred. Also, the wind mill needs to be highly durable as marine environments tend to degrade windmills more quickly than what is common on land. [6][7]
Current ships
Few windmill ships have been built to date; these include [8]:
- Jim Bates' Te whaka
- Lindsay Olen's Thrippence
- Peter Worsley's windmill-driven boat
- ?'s Revelation 2