Isegoria

China develops a water-skimming plane:

Chinese scientists have developed a “Wing-In-Ground” (WIG) aircraft which can fly long distances just a few feet above the sea surface, state media said on Wednesday.

The plane can fly as low as half a meter (1 ft 7 ins) off the surface, hitting speeds of up to 300 km (180 miles) per hour and can carry up to 4 tonnes on takeoff.

“It’s as safe as ships, although five or six times faster,” associate professor Xu Zhengyu, vice-president of the research team at Tongji University in Shanghai, was quoted as saying.

“And it can carry much more weight than ordinary planes while costing half as much and using half as much fuel.”

Wing In Ground effect refers to the reduction in drag experienced by an aircraft as it approaches a height approximately twice a wingspan’s length off the ground or other level surface such as the sea.

China, of course, is not the first nation to develop a WIG craft:

Though ground effect has been known since the early days of flight, most pilots regarded it as nothing more than a nuisance that changed the flying qualities of their aircraft during takeoff and landing. Nevertheless, many researchers soon realized that this phenomenon could be exploited to produce a new class of highly efficient craft known as WIG vehicles. Most of the pioneering research into these vehicles was performed in West Germany and the Soviet Union.

Perhaps the most successful researcher in this field was Rostislav Alexeiev, head of the Central Hydrofoil Design Bureau in the Soviet Union from the 1950s through the early 1970s. Alexeiev began his career developing hydrofoils, which are boats fitted with underwater wings. When the boat moves, these wing create lift that pulls the boat hull up and out of the water and allows the craft to cruise at higher speeds. But Alexeiev quickly realized that a hydrofoil can only go so fast due to the drag created by the dense water through which it “flies.” Why not instead raise the entire vehicle out of the water and cruise at even higher speeds, he reasoned. This line of thought led to a new vehicle with wings above the surface of the water, a vehicle the size of a boat and able to carry a massive payload but able to cruise at the speed of an aircraft. Another advantage of such a vehicle would be the ability to fly at very low altitudes, below the detection range of enemy radar. Alexeiev dubbed this new class of vehicle the Ekranoplan, which is Russian for “screen plane.” His early designs were numbered under the SM series, an acronym standing for Samorodnaya Model, meaning “self sustained craft.”

Alexeiev developed a number of sub-scale designs in experimental tests that culminated in 1965 with the completion of the KM , the largest WIG vehicle ever built. Making its first flight on 18 October 1966, the KM was powered by a whopping 10 turbojet engines and weighed up to 540 tons. Eight of the engines were mounted near the vehicle’s nose so that their thrust could be deflected underneath the wing to create an initial cushion of air that raised the KM out of the water. Once the craft was traveling fast enough that the wings generated sufficient lift to keep the vehicle above the water, the thrust was redirected aft to increase velocity.

The KM was modified numerous times to evaluate the effects of different design elements. Among these changes included varying the wingspan from 105 ft (32 m) to 131 ft (40 m) and increasing the fuselage length from 302 ft (92 m) to 347 ft (106 m). The KM, also dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster by American observers who spotted the craft in satellite surveillance, remained in use until 1980 when it crashed during takeoff.

Although Alexeiev passed away in 1980, his design bureau continued to build and test Ekranoplans until the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the more successful concepts was the Lun, which began trials on the Caspian Sea in 1987. The Lun was of similar design to the KM but smaller and built to carry anti-ship cruise missiles for high-speed attacks against American carrier battle groups.

Randall Parker notes that we don’t so much face an energy shortage as fossil fuels run out as an Energy Storage Shortage. Fossil fuels store an enormous amount of energy in an easy-to-transport form that you can burn when and where you want.

Sodium-sulphur batteries may “enable solar and wind power to provide electricity when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow”:

An NaS battery, by contrast, uses a far more durable porcelain-like material to bridge the electrodes, giving it a life span of about 15 years, Mears says. It also takes up about a fifth of the space. Ford Motor pioneered the battery in the 1960s to power early-model electric cars; NGK and Tokyo Electric refined it for the power grid.

Since the 1990s, Japanese businesses have installed enough NaS batteries to light the equivalent of about 155,000 homes, says Brad Roberts, head of the Electricity Storage Association. In the USA, AEP is using the 30-foot-wide by 15-foot-high battery to supply 10% of the electricity needs of 2,600 customers in north Charleston, says Ali Nourai, AEP manager of distributed energy. The battery, which cost about $2.5 million, is charged by generators from the grid at night, when demand and prices are low, and discharged during the day when power usage peaks.
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The biggest drawback is price. The battery costs about $2,500 per kilowatt, about 10% more than a new coal-fired plant.

Commenter Jerry Martinson makes an important point though:

Much of the diurnal “peak” of energy consumption can be handled much more cost-effectively on the consumption end rather than the generation and storage end. Most of the peak of consumption is from air conditioning. It is possible to not only shift the peak in time but it is also possible to drastically reduce the peak altogether in certain markets. Better insulation is a major component and a revamped performance-based energy building code would make a big start.

Frankly, as long as the end consumer pays no premium for peak-time energy, we won’t see much done on the consumption end.

There are any number of ways to reduce or shift energy use, many of them via passive solar building design.

For instance, a home with many large windows to the south — assuming it’s in the northern hemisphere, of course — will naturally bring in more sunlight and, like a greenhouse, stay warm.

That’s great during the winter, but what do you do during the summer?

Well, you design your windows with overhangs that block the high summer sun without blocking the low winter sun.

(I must admit, that wasn’t obvious to me before I read about it.)

Also, you can make sure that heat gets put to use when it’s needed by making sure the sun is shining on a signicant thermal mass — thick bricks, or concrete, or barrels of water — which will take a long time to warm up and a long time to cool down.

In fact, many of these techniques were widely used throughout history:

During the fifth century BC., the Greeks faced severe fuel shortages. Fortunately, an alternative source of energy was available — the sun. Archaeological evidence shows that a standard house plan evolved during the fifth century so that every house, whether rural or urban, could make maximum use of the sun’s warm rays during winter. Those living in ancient Greece confirm what archaeologists have found. Aristotle noted, builders made sure to shelter the north side of the house to keep out the cold winter winds. And Socrates, who lived in a solar-heated house, observed, “In houses that look toward the south, the sun penetrates the portico in winter” which keeps the house heated in winter. The great playwright Aeschylus went so far as to assert that only primitives and barbarians “lacked knowledge of houses turned to face the winter sun, dwelling beneath the ground like swarming ants in sunless caves.”