Analysis: German company eyes wind ship

BERLIN, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- A German wind turbine manufacturer wants to power large freight ships with wind energy as rising oil price have caused energy firms to become interested in the cutting-edge technology.

The computer-generated image of the freight ship of the future is at first startling: Out of each of the ship deck's four corners blooms a steel cylinder, looking like chimneys from a long outdated fossil fuel era. But the cylinders rotate and they don't give off any emissions. On the contrary, they are the key elements of a new wind propulsion system for ships, with which German company Enercon wants to save emissions and fossil fuels based on a physical phenomenon known for the past 150 years.

In 1853, Gustav Magnus, a physicist from Berlin, discovered that when air flows around a rotating object, its one side with the spinning increases the velocity of the air flow, while the other side, spinning in the opposite direction, decreases the air flow. The resulting pressure differential drives the object perpendicular to the direction of the wind -- like a curve ball in baseball or a top spin in Tennis.

In the 1920s, Anton Flettner, another German scientist, used the principle of the Magnus effect to power a sailboat: With wind blowing from the side, the rotating cylinders, two of which he mounted on his boat Baden-Baden, pushed it forward.

The Baden-Baden -- after a speedy cross over the Atlantic -- was even praised by Albert Einstein as having great practical importance, but its propulsion system never became a commercial success.

Germany's largest wind turbine manufacturer Enercon believes the wind ship today has a much greater potential to succeed than in the 1920s.

The petroleum prices shipping companies currently have to pay increased three-fold in the past two years. A wind-powered freighter could save massive amounts of crude oil and drive down costs by "30 to 40 percent," Rolf Rohden, an engineer at Enercon, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

"Flettner banked on the system at the wrong time, so even the brilliant technology didn't help," he said.

Enercon has more than 9,000 wind turbines installed all over the world, and is increasingly relying on exporting its large turbines and rotor blades. With the new ship, overseas deliveries could be handled "as environmentally friendly as possible," Rohden said.

Enercon has tasked a northern German ship builder with making the first prototype. Nearly 430 feet in length, the aerodynamical rotor freight ship will be able to carry some 10,000 tons of wind turbines. The prototype will make use of the same principle as the Baden-Baden did in the 1920s, but it is now built of modern materials and features a fully automated steering system. The launch of the ship is planned for April 2008. Half a year later, it is expected to make its first delivery.

While Rohden told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper he was optimistic that the ship's propulsion system will become attractive for commercial ship travel, other experts are not so sure.

"This has been tried many times before, with limited success," Christian Oliver Paschereit, an expert at the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Engineering Acoustics at Berlin's Technical University told United Press International in a telephone interview.

In strong seas, the large, heavy cylinders could pose a security and a reliability problem, he said.

"Under these conditions, one has to see if the system works without failing over a longer period of time."

An Enercon spokesman contacted by UPI did not want to comment on the project.

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