Activity Update for 20 Sept 2009 This has been a very busy month so far in making fantastic inroads in the overall design of the ship itself as well as sub-systems.
Just to start with: Contact has been made with the University of Oregon Electrical Engineering and Chemical Engineering Departments although there has not been any response at this time in reference to those contacts. The most exciting contacts have been with the Oregon State University in Corvallis Oregon. The Dean of the Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences Collage was quite receptive to our ideas and referred me to Dr. Chris Goldfinger and Dr. Alan Mix (http://www.coas.oregonstate.edu/). In what turned out to be an extremely informative and productive morning of meetings with them, I am feeling very hopeful and positive for their overall support and possible recommendations.
I have been told that Burt Rutan (Designer of Spaceship One) was involved with the original design of the Turbo Sail system. So with that in mind, I have been pursuing in contacting him for possible information. While meeting with Dr. Goldfinger, I was given a lot of information about how the American Process for research ships and research requests for the actual ships occurs. Unfortunately, I was also shown how little the US actually participates in Ocean research. This information will be invaluable in the future operations and management of our vessel in the aspect of operational costs. This will help us to investigate our own opportunities in being part of the NSF fleet (http://www.nsf.gov/). I have made contact with the National Science Foundation in order to see where that will take us.
Turning to the system engineering aspect of the Trimaran, I was able to make contact with Donald Heer of Oregon State University Engineering program who was very open to the ideas and concepts behind the project. With that, we will be putting together a proposal for the Graduate Studies R&D in order to design an energy mergence subsystem that will monitor all of the various energy inputs (such as solar cell, wind electrical generation, ocean current electrical generation, etc…) in order to match the various systems together to be used for charging the batteries and other electoral needs.
Dennis Ingemansson has been working on some very important work of his own (www.dennisingemansson.com ) but has still found a little bit of free time to work on some designs and renderings for the advanced design of the Trimaran. I will get these posted in the next week or so.
Feargus Bryan who has also been one of our top key supporters and designers has also found a bit of free time in order to advance some additional renderings for designs. I will get these posted in the next week or so as well. Feargus has been greatly instrumental in helping to set up the overall load balancing, subsystems, ideas, scheduling, and many other aspects of the project. I want to specifically thank these two as well as everybody else that has taken the time to participate… for their continued efforts, support, and the advancement of the dream of this project. I look forward to the time that we can all meet together and walk upon the deck of the first International Green research vessel in history that was created and organized using the internet. There is a lot of work to be accomplished and I would like to encourage each of you to help out with a small bit of your time and expertise.
There is a lot of research needed, making contacts with people and experts, writing proposals, sourcing and writing various grants, sponsors, and requests for technology assistance. Just started a Twitter page… http://twitter.com/Green_Island_ (Will take a bit of time to get use to it and keep it updated).
