FLYING WITH NISHATI
Your pilot is a local.
The drone aircraft she flies is strong and sleek.
It is a flying wind energy extraction machine called a Power Drone. Two propellers in the front, cameras streaming high definition video to the ground, an open source flight computer running her code, and a tether line running down to an Electric Vehicle on the ground.
Her name is Nishati and she loves her job. She remotely pilots special “Power Drone” aircraft to generate electricity for her village.
Over her head, a vast wind energy source is blowing. There is more electricity blowing in the wind than humanity may ever need, and it is abundant in great excess nearly anywhere in the world. Think 50,000 times more electricity than we use today, right there over us all.
When a mass of air moves, we call it wind. In that wind is energy. Lots and lots of energy. All we need to do is fly up with an aircraft and send that energy back down to the ground. We need a rope or cable called a tether line, just like a kite, but connected to a motor-generator on the ground.
Back on Earth, the energy from wind becomes electricity, and electricity becomes light and refrigeration and drinking water and knowledge. Electricity is a warm security blanket. Electricity is cooling fan. Electricity is access to information, and a better life for all that seek it.
Electricity is power.
To reach the vast wind energy source in the sky above and pull it down to Earth for her village, Nishati remotely controls a “flying wing” type Power Drone, and right now it flies about 100 meters above her head.
Safely on the ground, Nishati sits in a recycled Electric Vehicle with the climate control humming along just the way she likes it. She wears a sleek Virtual Reality headset with an On Screen Display that tells her everything she needs to know about how this day is going, powering the village.
“The aircraft inhales wind energy through it’s wings,” Nishati says to you over a wireless headset.
“And the Electric Vehicle exhales electricity through its motor-generator.”
As a Power Drone Pilot, Nishati gets respect. She is confident, calm and has a wide range of high tech skills. Nishati can literally fix almost anything. She also writes poetry.
“Electricity is like air. It is our right to breathe it,” she says.
“We breath air for free. Although we cannot see it, it is all around us. Air is a gift from nature, by nature, for all living things that seek to breath. Electricity is no different.”
As she ages, her mind grows ever sharper by learning whatever topics interest her at the moment. She solves problems all day long. Her favorite is how to stay three steps ahead of the wind when she turns the autopilot off to “fly manual.”
When pilots get sleepy, they turn off the autopilot for a while, and their hearts begin to pound.
Nishati describes herself as “Muumbaji.” A maker.
She is always improving one of her many open source designs. It makes her proud that her life as a Power Drone Pilot helps people not just here in the village, but all around the world. She is part of a world wide web of doers, makers, thinkers, and creators. To a Muumbaji, this doesn’t feel like work at all. Life is an intellectual adventure, and she knows how to handle adrenaline.
They say she can tune a flight control system better than any. And if she likes her new configuration better than the last, she uploads it to GitHub. As if to thank her, the flight computers make work pleasant. Her autopilot downloads go viral.
You are in the recycled shipping container that acts as the ground base for power generation. You stand up to look at the Electric Vehicle windshield external Heads Up Display.
“I made that,” she tells you. Projected onto the glass of the front windshield, like a hologram, you can see that her heart rate “delta” is only 5 beats per minute above resting. She is relaxed.
Today Nishati is sitting in a Tesla Model 3. Her favorite.
The 250 kW (335 horsepower) motor-generator inside was designed by artificial intelligence and spends its days and nights relaxing in nice warm bath of purple ATF-9 gearbox oil. Nishati doesn’t mind changing the oil because she almost never has to do it. The SKF gearbox is a completely sealed system and there are no hydrocarbons to gum it up. The motor-generator and gearbox have an unlimited lifetime warranty. No mileage limitations at all. They are designed for it. They operate at such a low dynamic load that they can theoretically run forever.
(See photos of a Tesla Model 3 gearbox and motor-generator in my Electric Vehicle Research Lab: https://photos.app.goo.gl/7cPZRtdc1NpDbfov7)
The Tesla Model 3 is generating electricity right now as her aircraft pulls the winch line attached to the rear wheel spindles through a series of mechanical guideways and pulleys that utilize the vehicle’s suspension system in a way that mimics driving. The suspension system soaks up turbulence, which to the car is like driving on a bumpy road, and this limits the mechanical stress on the tether line.
The car thinks it is driving down a hill, but actually the aircraft is climbing and pulling on the tether line. It is recharging the 50 kilowatt-hour (kW*hour) battery pack by regenerative braking.
“The battery pack is only the tip of the iceberg,” she told you during your aerial site-seeing tour last week.
“The big energy storage is a drinking water pond,” she said. “When we are generating, the water pump at the village turns on. And that moves water from the rushing river up to the natural water pond at the top of the hill. That pond, or tank, is full of native plants and fish, so we filter the water on it’s way back down using ultraviolet light and charcoal membranes.”
“Water is heavy and dense, so when you pump it up a hill you are storing lots of energy. When you get thirsty for electrons or water, you just let it run back down hill and generate electricity. Gravity does the work. The town gets ‘crystal punch’ as we call drinking water, and electric juice too.”
“It’s called ‘pumped hydro energy storage’ and it was the most prevalent source of renewable energy for a long long time. But it got a bit of a bad reputation because it was done on such a massive scale. Here we like little tanks with plants and fish and we don’t displace land owners. We just make their land more valuable if they want us to.”
“Most land owners like having more water for agriculture and drinking, and habitat for helpful living things like aquatic insects that grow up in the water, and then hatch and fly and eat pest species.”
You reply, “When I was a kid, this is how I imagined the future. I believed this kind of thing was possible… I mean, that there is enough here on Earth for every living thing.”
“And now here you are living it, creating it!” you say, smiling. “I want to understand it all. Teach me something new!”
“Copy that,” she says.
“Here’s one…” and thinks for a moment.
“Did you know that all motors are generators too? That’s why we like to call them ‘motor-generators.’ It’s more accurate than calling them motors.”
By the way, it’s okay to talk with a pilot while they are flying if nothing else is talking. If she is busy, she will say “stop talking,” and you need to stop talking immediately.
Your wireless bone conduction headset walkie-talkies let Nishati hear what you, or any of the flight computers, might say. She thinks they are worth the money because they let her hear the wind, and the sound of the tether line, the vehicle she’s sitting in, or a live audio feed from the drone when she wants to.
Nishati can also talk with locals over the Public Address speaker outside the shipping container when they come by to charge phones, grab distilled water, or even to hook up a new Power Network Cable. All this is done on the outside walls of the shipping container, which has become a bit of a water cooler for town gossip. There are even metal boxes with medical supplies such as suture kits and antibiotics.
On the outside walls of the shipping container, there are also lots of Power Network Bus Bars covered with metal plates, and a nest of Power Network Cables feed down to the ground and then snake their way off into the jungle in all directions.
If you remove the cover plates, the Power Network Bus Bars look like big long rectangular bars of aluminum oriented vertically.
“Electricity is sweet,” Nishati told you earlier this morning as you walked to the shipping container ground base. “We call them candy bars.”
There are four Power Network Bus Bars under each cover plate. Qualified villagers follow a special protocol to attach their Power Network Cables to the bus bars, starting at the bottom, and then close the cover plate. The procedures are illustrated graphically on etched metal plates, in the style of the safety instruction cards on a commercial airliner.
The village is powered by a new type of non-sinusoidal three phase Power Network that operates at “reduced hazard voltage levels.” Think 48 Volts. It is a completely different technology than a conventional Power Grid. We call it a Power Network.
Power Networks are more like the Internet then they are like the Power Grid.
In most places you don’t need to be a certified electrician. Scan your badge and you can remove the cover plate. However, you first need to understand the protocols and risks and pass your qualification test.
Power Networks are designed for people to use.
Power Networks allow people to bring power to people.
Power to the people!
Inside the shipping container where you are sitting, things are a bit more dangerous.
The shipping container is always locked for safety reasons, and when you are inside it’s a “Talk but don’t touch, and keeps your hands in your pockets” kind of situation. There are mechanical and electrical things in the container that can hurt you. Qualified personnel only.
You are only allowed in as a visitor because you got qualified for your visitor badge ahead of time, and the car Nishati is flying used to be yours.
It was you that donated the Tesla she’s driving, last year. So cool to see it all in person for the first time.
“Energy is never created nor destroyed,” she says. “But it will change forms for free.”
Alert: Don’t get her started about Michael Faraday, please! He’s been dead since 1867 but she talks like she’s in love.
She can’t see your puzzled face, but she knows what you are thinking. She pauses for a moment before going on, fiddling with some tuning gains on the flight controller while its accelerometers soaks up 15 times the acceleration of gravity (“15 G’s”) and the Power Drone executes beautiful chaotic looking flight patterns above. It’s chasing the wind.
The drone is following the wind vectors to fly near the “Betz Limit.” The Betz Limit is the maximum amount of mechanical energy you can pull out of the wind to generate electricity. No more than 59.3 percent.
But don’t worry, that is way more than enough. Power Drones can generate on the order of 20 thousand Watts per meter of wingspan. That is a very large amount of electricity. One meter of wing is cable of charging thousands of cell phones simultaneously, or powering 1,300 Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs, or 5,000 LED lamps.
“For free!” she goes on. “Energy changes form for free, with no losses. Otherwise energy would not be conserved in the process.”
You look at her skeptically.
“Let me be a little more clear. All of the energy transferred from the mechanical world makes it ‘through the portal’ into the electrical world. The portal is the motor-generator.”
“But in the process some of it gets converted to forms of energy other than electricity and doesn’t make it all the way into the battery terminals. Heat is the biggest one. The copper windings have resistance, and there are little circulating currents in the silicon iron steel of the motor-generator, which are called eddy currents. But energy doesn’t go away, it just moves around and takes different forms.”
“Sometimes heat can be useful. The motor acts as a heater for the battery pack when it’s cold for example,” she says.
“Got it,” you say, pouring a glass of Kombucha tea. It’s ice cold. Cold enough to give you a brain freeze if you get carried away. Made with distilled water right out of the air from one of the dehumidifiers running the four corners of shipping container. Brushless fans made out of drone props purr silently overhead.
The shipping container lid is open when flying, and you can see fluffy white clouds above. Sunroof open!
“This shipping container is a lot more comfortable than it looks from the outside,” you say, looking around. Inside is everything needed to keep the drones flying and electricity flowing almost indefinitely. There are ruggedized outdoor computers, solder station desks for building and repairing electronics, bins full of replacement parts, including foam blocks and “hot wires” for cutting new wings, and carbon fiber cloth and resin for making them strong.
“It’s high tech civilization in a box,” you say.
“Exactly,” replies Nishati. “Or at least everything that’s needed to keep electricity flowing almost indefinitely.”
“Ready for more physics?” Nishati says.
“Yes please!” you reply. “Take me further down the cosmic rabbit hole of physics!”
“Okay, here we go,” Nishati says, and then flips a switch on her radio control transmitter that takes the Power Drone into a descent, and the Electric Vehicle in reverse, to effortlessly winch the line back in while being fed by the weight of the cable itself.
“Once you establish a magnetic field, then anything that changes it produces a voltage. There are lots of ways to change the field. Motion can do it, for example, or changing the flow of current through a coil of wire. You with me?”
“Copy that,” you say, trying to sound pilot cool.
“Physics explains the world we live in. It sounds like magic but it’s not. The world we live in is magical.”
“Ah, sure thing,” you say, wondering if such a scientific person as Nishati is pulling your leg about thinking the world is truly magical.
“Physics is truth. Anyone can test it. This vehicle is testing it right now, and proving what is true! Truth does exist, at least temporarily! If we are wrong about how physics works, anyone can find that out through experiments,” she says.
“That winch line is pulling on the wheel spindles. We take the tires off, put the rims back on, and spool the kite rope around the rims. The spindle turns the motor-generator shaft. Inside is where the ‘magic’ happens. It’s a portal between worlds. There are permanent magnets on the rotating part, which forms something called a Hallbach Array. That arrangement of magnets just projects the field out and into the stationary part where there are coils of magnet wire.”
“The magnetic field from the permanent magnets rotates past the magnet wire coils on the stationary part. The motion of those magnets whizzing past causes the magnetic field to change. What Michael Faraday discovered is that ‘change makes voltage.’ So think of the motor-generator as a voltage source.”
“The faster the motor spins, the more voltage. Do you know why?” she asks.
You think for a moment and then reply, “Because the faster the motor spins, the faster the magnetic field changes, and that means more voltage.”
“Exactly. And all we have to do to extract the mechanical energy and make it into electricity is to allow current to flow,” she says.
“That’s beautiful,” you say. “We know from Ohms Law that current always flows from higher voltage to lower voltage. But how do we control the flow of current?”
“You got it,” Nishati says. “We control the flow of current using the vehicle’s traction inverter. If the inverter voltage is higher than the internal voltage of the motor, then current flows into the motor, and it spins faster since we are moving energy from electrical to mechanical worlds. We call this motoring.”
“Voltage is like air pressure. Current is like the movement of an air mass. Current flows. Voltage stands its ground.”
“But when the motor is spinning, we can control the inverter voltage using the accelerator and brake pedals. If we make the inverter voltage less than the internal voltage of the motor-generator, then current flows out of the motor-generator and the battery is charged. This slows down the motor, tugging back on the line against the Power Drone. We call this generating.”
“That actually makes sense,” you say.
“It kind of feels like a gift from nature, that motor-generators can transform energy so well back and forth.”
“It’s physics, mon,” she says. “It’s cool. Change is voltage. Magnetic fields are the interface between the mechanical world and the electrical world. That is what Michael Faraday figured out. Like me, he wasn’t a textbook trained scientist either,” she says laughing.
“It’s beautiful,” you say. “Powerful.”
“Yep. We can take energy from the mechanical world, from the motion of the wind above us, and if we establish a magnetic field then energy flows freely into our Power Network,” she says.
“So, if we have moving air above and want electricity, we just need a magnetic field and some wires. In the magnetic field, energy flows as easily in one direction as the other. It has to so that energy is conserved. Energy cannot be created or destroyed in a closed system, it only changes forms”
“Not all of the energy makes it to the battery though, right?” you reply. “Some of it goes to heat, and sound and other forms of energy.”
“You got it. No free lunch,” she says.
“Nishati, you are a really good teacher,” you say. “This is actually starting to make sense.”
You feel goosebumps on the back of your neck as you lean back in your chair to stare up at the drone above. The flight pattern is mesmerizing. The aircraft already descended for another generation run so it’s closer now, and on it’s way back up generating power.
You can see the carbon fiber arrows with feathers on them, angled back from the motor mounts at the front of the wings. They are just like the arrows one might shoot with a recurve bow.
“What are those arrows?” you ask. “They aren’t just to make the drones look cool, I’m guessing.”
“Nope. They are a design feature invented by the open source community,” Nishati replies.
“The arrow tips attach at the motor mounts on the front of the wing, which is the strongest part of the plane, and they absorb a lot of the stress and strain instead of the airframe, and they also help to stabilize the aircraft in six degrees of freedom.”
“There are plastic pieces at the feather end where you would normally ‘knock a bow’ for archery. This end can act as landing gear for Vertical Take Off and Landing.”
“Gotcha,” you say.
“The arrows also absorb higher frequency energy instead of the plane, which provides damping of vibrations. As they bend in the air they act like little shock absorbers.”
“Okay but energy is never created or destroyed, so where does that vibration energy go, if the arrows absorb it?”
“Good point. We know energy in a closed system can only be converted,” she replies.
“In this case, it is converted to the sound of an arrow slicing through the air, which is a nice sound. And also to heat. The arrows actually get hot! But don’t worry, they have lots of cooling because they are literally flying through the wind.”
“Think of the arrows as little flying tuning forks that are designed to absorb mechanical energy at certain frequencies, and turn it into heat. Standard carbon fiber archery arrows are already designed that way.”
“But the most interesting thing about those arrows is where they point. Guess where?” she says.
“Well, certainly ahead of the plane in the direction we want to fly,” you say.
“Yes, but there is a very particular location we aim them, along an axis going to infinity in the direction the plane is flying.”
“The Betz Limit?” you ask.
“You got it. Think 59.3 percent of the way to infinity, right along a line that points in the direction the aircraft is heading,” she says.
“Why? Because that’s the Betz Limit Focal Point. Those arrows are amazing little mechanical autopilots that ‘feel the wind vector’ and control the aircraft speed to fly right at the Betz Limit. There are usually four fixed arrows pointing at the focal point.”
“Got it,” you say. “And just like shooting a bow, the arrow goes where you point it?”
“Yes,” she says. “In this case, the whole plane goes there. The arrows ‘feel the wind’ and steer the plane into it. By angling them just the right way, they stabilize the flight, and control the speed of the plane to fly at a speed that is nearly optimal for taking mechanical energy out of the wind.”
“This must be a very strong airplane to withstand that kind of mechanical force,” you say.
“In addition, there is often one more arrow that attaches to a pan and tilt gantry rather than being set at a fixed angle. This one does the fine tuning of the aircraft steering, but generally it aims at the Betz Limit Focal Point. This arrow is aimed under the control of two powerful servo motors. The gantry usually sits on top of the aircraft, away from the center of gravity. There is also has a high definition camera on the gantry that is aimed where the arrow points. The pilots see digital cross hair reticle aimed right where the arrow is ‘looking,’ and that’s where the plane goes.”
“Got it,” you reply. “The pilot steers the aiming arrow, and the camera looks where that arrow points, and that is where the plane goes.”
“Yep,” she says. “Optionally, a pattern can be added on top. In this case, the autopilot does some math to calculate an orbit around the focal point, which is often a circle or a figure 8 (infinity) pattern, and this gets added to the aiming arrow vector.”
“Meanwhile the drone charts a path through the sky that does a good job of showing you the wind vector. The accelerometer and gyroscope data along with the steering arrow vector is logged and saved in an open source database online, and scientists use it to create better models of the atmosphere, and that in turn improves weather forecasting. At night, the pilots can turn on green lasers that point where all the arrows are pointing, and anyone can look up and see exactly how it all works.”
“The air is a ‘vector field’ of moving molecules, and the direction in which the vector is pointing can be very complex, chaotic and interesting. It gets a lot of people interesting in learning about vector math and quantum physics. Those little air molecules exist on the boundary between the macro world of big air masses moving around, and the quantum world of those extremely tiny atoms bouncing off each other, which can best be explained as probabilities.”
You reply, “When I see those laser shows at night, it becomes clear that energy is abundant in the atmosphere.”
“Exactly,” replies Nishati.
“Energy for all.”
STORY BY FlyJus™
Interested?
Learn more about the open source design and how to contribute.
ABOUT FlyJus™
FlyJus™ is a non-profit organization that helps anyone in the world who wants electricity to have lots of it.
Electricity makes life better.
We believe in clean, green electricity, water, Internet, and a high tech maker education for all that seek it.
We know how to do it, and we will make it happen.
Powerful knowledge.
Electricity for all.
We are FlyJus™.
ABOUT THIS STORY
The story above is open source, and you can contribute to it. The story is written in the style of a fictional novel set in the near future, and the characters are fictional but the design details disclosed are non-fictional.
Our intent is to paint for you a very realistic picture of how the open source design works, and to disclose many important aspects of the design, so the FlyJus™ design sets can never be patented and are free for all to use.
Some of the design features described have been fully demonstrated by various makers around the world, while others are in development. Many ideas are new and being disclosed for the first time, such as the use of electric vehicles for airborne wind power generation, but we believe all are all based on sound physics.
The physics and theory of operation described is intended for peer review, so if you do find anything that appears to be a mistake or misstatement, please contact us and we will mark any corrections.
There are also many alternative proprietary airborne wind turbine designs that have already been commercialized, and I have personally worked with and given software grants to several world class companies and research teams over the years. Please respect their patents and buy their turbines!
All aspects of these design disclosures are based on commercially available technologies, such as drone flight computers and open source autopilot and ground control software tools. The technology available today is astounding. However, our use of the past tense in this document should not be misinterpreted to mean that all of this really cool work has already been finished.
We hope you enjoy our vision and that you will contribute your own ideas to it as well, so that it becomes yours. We are a community. Open source designs can improve much faster than proprietary ones because the rate of improvement increases over time as more clever people contribute.
It is together that we all bring our shared vision for the world into the present tense.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My name is Brian MacCleery and my life mission is to enable anyone in the world that wants electricity to have it in abundance. I have been fascinated and obsessed with magnets and electricity since my earliest childhood memories.
Growing up near Washington, D.C., it became clear to me that it was scientists and engineers that were changing the world. Not politicians. It seemed that the best the politicians could do was try to respond to the changes brought about by technology. I deeply wanted to understand how technology works, and to develop theories that would help us understand how it progresses over time. It was much later that I came to understand that technology evolves, and that the evolution of technology can be modeled and forecast into the future, and these forecasts can be used to make decisions.
My fascination with magnetics has persisted throughout my life. In high school I developed my own theories for how magnets interact with the mechanical world. (It turned out those theories were already well described by Michael Faraday, but it was a great adventure to rediscover them myself.) From this research, I won a US Navy Science scholarship that helped pay for my Electrical Engineering education at Virginia Tech. There I met one of my great life mentors, Dr. Krishnan Ramu, who is one of the most famous experts on electric motors in the world. We took his design principals for rotating machines and translated them into linear motion, and then formed a virtual company and recruited students from all departments to build magnetic levitation electric vehicles which float in the air suspended by magnetic fields. It was then I learned the incredible power of volunteers that share a common vision and goal. At it’s peak, we had over 80 students from all departments including business and marketing, and a magnetic levitation vehicle the size of a coffee table running effortlessly down a 10 meter track. It was exhilarating!
After graduation, I joined the National Instruments corporation and launched one of the best platforms in the world for controlling electricity and magnetism. It is rugged embedded control system platform called NI CompactRIO, and it uses special chips called FPGAs that literally rewire themselves to run your software as hardware. Very fast! Electricity fast! Over my 20 year career at National Instruments, I worked with thousands of companies and tens of thousands of engineers all around the world. My greatest joy was working with renewable energy companies, and the electronic control of power (known as ‘power electronics.’) To help startups, I administered a green energy grant program that provided $50,000 in free software and training to awarded companies. I developed and published, and maintained a massive open source library of control software for the power electronics developer community, as well as special versions of the CompactRIO platform meant to make it less expensive and risky for companies to bring their clean energy technology to the Power Grid.
Somewhere during this time, it became clear to me that renewable energy sources like wind were going to be cheaper than the old fossil fuel sources by 2020. Yet something odd was happening with the clean energy startup companies and Power Grid utilities that I tried to help. It was as if the new innovations were all crashing into a brick wall. Eventually, it became clear that this impenetrable brick wall is the Power Grid. It turns out that the utilities have a business model called a ‘government backed monopoly’ and literally have no motivation whatsoever to change in any way, even when new technologies are less expensive and superior to the old ones. Utilities spend less on innovation than the operators of rock quarries. Why would you innovate when the government guarantees your profitability in perpetuity for not changing at all?
