GREENWAVE - WASP - Wind assisted Ship Propulsion

Most of the shipping routes used by modern cargo vessels follow the routes established by clippers and merchant ships in the days of sail. Those routes were adopted to make best use of the only means of ship propulsion then available – the wind or trade winds as they became known.

Wind power was abandoned when, first the steam engine, and then the diesel engine, made it possible to push heavily laden steel hulled cargo ships across any ocean providing you pushed them with a big enough engine. Highly sustainable though sail power is, a return to the wind power days is simply not a commercially practical consideration…or is it?

The Greenwave Project Team set about researching the many ways that wind power might be harnessed for modern ships. Indeed some ocean testing is being done elsewhere using giant kites to assist propulsion.

In theory it is perfectly possible to fit a bank of smaller sails to ships and develop enough thrust to provide at least some propulsion for free. But calculations soon revealed that the surface area of sail would need to be at least two and a half thousand square metres to make a significant impact on the fuel consumption.

Most crews on board ocean going merchant vessels are seaman not sailors and the difficulties of reefing in a very large kite, or multiple sails, in a 50 knot squall are considerable. Such hazardous conditions represent serious operational as well as health and safety issues. Greenwave’s Project Team persevered and discovered that, before wind power was first steam rollered and then diesel engined into oblivion,two Germans, one a physicist and the other an engineer, had between them harnessed the power of the wind in a unique and imaginative way. A test ship was successfully ocean-trialed in an Atlantic crossing using this revolutionary technology.

Almost one hundred years later Greenwave’s team have blown the dust off that proven invention and, using modern technology and materials, have brought it up to date. The Greenwave Wind Engine has arrived.

The wind engine uses a phenomenon known as the Magnus effect, first discovered by Gustav Magnus in 1852. When wind hits a spinning vertical cylinder it creates a very low pressure on one side which generates lift and hence thrust in a similar way that a sail does. But the Greenwave Wind Engine generates ten times more propulsion than the equivalent profile area of a sail.

The initial wind tunnel tests, carried out at the University of Auckland’s Twisted Flow Wind Tunnel and tow tank tests carried out at Southampton Solent University, have indicated that the Greenwave Wind Engines are capable of providing at least 13% of the thrust required to propel a ship, saving 900 tonnes of fuel per year.

All wind tunnel photographs were taken at the University of Auckland’s Twisted Flow Wind Tunnel

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Special thanks to the team at the University of Auckland’s Twisted Flow Wind Tunnel.

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