Energy_Animal video

Full report : https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/www/labs/energy_animal/Energy_Animal001

Video on Facebook | Youtube | Vimeo | Dailymotion | download HD movie (160Mb .mov)

The Energy_Animal is a device that produces renewable energy from the wind, the sun, and the waves.
The Energy_Animal can produce energy is a variety of irregular weather conditions, producing a reliable output.
Mostly made of free recycled materials, attracting and concentrating marine life instead of repelling it.
One Energy_Animal can be part of an energy farm, or it can drift on its own.
It is going where there is more energy to be collected, or where energy is most needed.
It is cheap to build, the design of the Energy_Animal is open-source, so there can be many concurrent or merging versions of different Energy_Animals. There is no development time, generation after generation a better design is emerging.
The idea is to produce cheap reliable green energy evolutive devices for a rapidly changing world.

We need a green energy revolution now, and we are responsible for it.

Concept characteristics of Energy_Animal001

• Hybrid renewable energy 
• Recycled materials 
• Probiotic Impact 
• Distributed Intelligence 
• Lightweight & Reconfigurable 
• Open-Source & Evolutionary 

http://energyanimal.org

Credits 

Design : Cesar Harada, Open_Sailing, Royal College of Art, Design Interactions
Film : Antonia Nottebohm, University of Munich, 2010
Science : Dr. Heller, Prof. Chaplin, Southampton University
Thanks to : Jessica Spurrell, Soumik Sengupta, Aga Wypychowska,
Fiona Raby, Anthony Dunne, Tim Olden, Vamessa Rolf, Helen Bailey, Jennifer Indovina.

Commissioned by :
EPSRC (Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council).
NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts).
Design Interactions, RCA (Royal College of Art), London.
http://opensailing.net http://energyanimal.org 

Best of Inhabitat: 6 Super-Cool Floating Homes and Habitats

HTTP://WWW.TREEHUGGER.COM/FILES/2010/03/FLOATING-HOMES.PHP?CAMPAIGN=TH_RSS
BY JASMIN MALIK CHUA, JERSEY CITY, USA ON 03.18.10DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE

BUZZ UP!

It used to be that rising tides due to climate change were just a far-off fear - now they're a present-day reality. But we all know that humans are a race of survivors, and some of the best designs come out of the necessity to adapt to environmental changes and challenges. So while we're working on actually mitigating global warming, architects, designers and visionaries are one step ahead, imagining homes, buildings and entire cities situated above or even beneath the surface of the world's oceans. Check out our favorites that we've seen "floating" around.

+ This crazy-looking tentacled underwater skyscraper is a self-sufficient floating city that can harvest renewable energy and grow its own food.

+ If you've been following news about the Maldives, you know that the island nation is being threatened by rising sea levels caused by climate change. But they aren't going out without a fight. Just last week, the government signed an agreement to develop several mini floating islands!

+ This floating home designed with San Francisco's dockside communities in mind is so beautiful and modern that it pains us for anyone to call it a mere "houseboat."

+ Okay, so technically this isn't a home or habitat, but it's definitely something you want to check out if you're interested in how we can make wind power more of a viable option. Installing offshore wind farms currently involves a lot of problems from underwater soil erosion and disruption of marine life to extravagant maintenance costs, and Hexicon's platform alleviates many of these issues.

+ As if taking a trip to the spa wasn't luxurious enough already, what if it were located on a private floating sanctuary? This lush garden island has baths, saunas, and treatment rooms all wrapped in a verdant shell of greenery designed by vertical garden mastermind Patrick Blanc.

+ Plunging to depths of about the same height as the Empire State Building, the Gyre is a full-fledged underwater city that is powered completely by the sun, wind and ocean.
—Written by Yuka Yoneda

Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/hydro-paraplant/

• By Alexis Madrigal  
• March 9, 2010  |  
• 1:36 pm  |  
• Categories: Energy

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

The new system is a remarkable, if a bit wacky, synthesis of different lines of new energy R&D. Park and Kim rightly note that parafoils — large industrial-strength kites — are now used by the German company Skysails to reduce the fuel consumption of ocean-going vessels by up to 35 percent.

High-altitude wind power using similar parafoils has received increasing attention from entrepreneurs and green tech backers like Google.org because the higher you go, the better and steadier the winds are.

And small groups have been working on hydroelectric generators mounted to sailboats.

But it’s fair to say that though the system is largely a recombination of things that are on the cusp of feasibility, nothing even remotely similar has been tried, or even suggested, by anyone. As such, the components such a plant would need are not currently manufactured. For example, the largest commercially available parafoil has an area of just 6,835 square feet, or about 945 times smaller than the wing the researchers propose.

The idea doesn’t even have a catchy name yet. Perhaps it could be called the “hydro paraplant.”

“Wind power generation with a parawing on ships, a proposal” in Energy 35 (2010) 1425–1432 by J. Kim and C. Park

Images: 1. Skysails. 2-4. Kim and Park.

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/hydro-paraplant/#ixzz0ietsxuNA

Energy_Animal update

So here's an update by Gerard Rallo and Antonio Carvalho Fernandes,  nice 3D renders ! Original .3DS file 1 | Original .3DS file 2 | original images

So the Energy_Animal now is more modular, in order to be able to upgrade and maitain it part by part, without having to change the entire thing.



This Energy_Animal is placed on little legs to be usable on land too.







And this fantastic presentation by Antonio Carvalho Fernandes.

Adapting wind turbine

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The vertival turbine contracts to protect itself in harsh conditions,  and expands in light winds.


Please visit the google document for more details.

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skysails kites, beluga

http://skysails.info/

I found the patents through this blog (along many others) :

But also found this 3 point sailing sytem for smaller units :