Gallucci, Maria. “Michelin Puts Puffy Sails on Cargo Ships.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, IEEE, 25 June 2021, 13:00 GMT, spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/wind/michelin-puffy-sails-cargo-ships-improve-fuel-economy.
Article title: Michelin Puts Puffy Sails on Cargo Ships
The move could boost a vessel’s fuel efficiency by 20 percent
Image: Michelin
My summary of the article:
Michelin, the well known French tire maker, is working on a project called WISAMO – an acronym for Wind Sail Mobility. WISAMO is a project that aims to attach inflatable structures onto cargo ships to help them cut through the wind like an airplane wing and send them flying across the water. Michelin believes that this technology will enable ships to harness wind energy for movement, ultimately and hopefully leading to a reduction in usage of diesel oil fuel and thus cutting down greenhouse gas emissions of cargo ships.
Michelin's prediction is that by 2022, this technology will be able to increase fuel efficiency of cargo ships by up to 20%; this is based on the simulations and technical tests that they have conducted. For large cargo ships, this means that thousands of liters of fuel will be saved, which is an enormous advantage in terms of both environmental effects and cost. Evidently, WISAMO is a very significant step for Michelin to slowly move towards completely decarbonizing its supply chain. Moreover, given that cargo ships are accountable for nearly 3% of the total annual greenhouse gas emissions, WISAMO is indeed a very meaningful and important project for the global advancement towards lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Michelin is currently looking at ways to expand their WISAMO technology so that it is effective on a global scale, making it accessible to the global shipping industry. This would mean that Michelin would have to run more simulations and real life trial runs to ensure that the fuel and cost are reduced to their promised extent.
My response to the article:
Similarly to the company named Sunthetics that I read about and reviewed on my 26th Tech & Engineering Review, Michelin's stance towards mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions is one that I personally very like. Not only are they focused on simply 'reducing CO2 emissions', but they are also considerate of the economic effect such a change would bring and the financial environment that an industry, in this case the shipping industry, is situated in. This is a more ideal way of approaching climate change than simply demanding abrupt change, since it provides companies a choice between a reasonable, economic set of possibilities rather than a blatantly radical, non economic choice.
Focusing on the technology itself, I like the way that it utilizes the ancient way of traveling by ship – sailing. With the development of advanced technology such as combustion engines, nearly all (if not all) boats and ships that we use today except those for leisure have turned away from sailing and uses engines to travel through the water. Although this is inevitable (and is the way things should be) given that technology is a continuous series of developments followed by developments, we should also be mindful of the fact the past teaches us important techniques as well. Especially given that due to fossil fuels and electricity being unavailable, people in the past had to rely on natural forms of energy to convert to useful energy, our technological history may be able to provide hints to extracting useful energy from natural, renewable forms of energy such as wind and waves, just like how Michelin is trying to deploy inflatable "sails" onto cargo ships.
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