I love ideas like this. I used to sail a bit in school vacations when I was young and feeling the raw power of the wind in your hands really drives home how practical it is to use wind. For thousands of years this is how people traveled the world. Most of the modern world was mapped and discovered long before steam power was invented. Using sail boats almost exclusively.
Of course steam power and later combustion engines replaced wind in the last 150 years or so. However a few things have changed since then that makes concepts like this viable again and worth exploring.
1) Material science has progressed, a lot. A modern wind foil compared to a canvas sail from a few centuries ago is not a fair comparison. Modern sail boats vastly out perform anything that was common before steam boats showed up. Lighter, faster, cheaper, etc.
2) Sail boats used to require a lot of people to operate them. Modern sail boats can be operated by a lot less people and solutions like this could feasibly be used on autonomous ships even. Automation and fine control assisted by lots of sensors and actuators are a game changer.
3) Before steam boats, navigation was primitive and we had no reliable way to predict weather. Ships would just drift out on the open ocean for weeks and journeys could take months. These days we have satellites. We know weather patterns and navigation is a solved problem. Also we've mapped ocean currents. This makes sailing a lot more predictable than it used to be.
Of course steam power and later combustion engines replaced wind in the last 150 years or so. However a few things have changed since then that makes concepts like this viable again and worth exploring.
1) Material science has progressed, a lot. A modern wind foil compared to a canvas sail from a few centuries ago is not a fair comparison. Modern sail boats vastly out perform anything that was common before steam boats showed up. Lighter, faster, cheaper, etc.
2) Sail boats used to require a lot of people to operate them. Modern sail boats can be operated by a lot less people and solutions like this could feasibly be used on autonomous ships even. Automation and fine control assisted by lots of sensors and actuators are a game changer.
3) Before steam boats, navigation was primitive and we had no reliable way to predict weather. Ships would just drift out on the open ocean for weeks and journeys could take months. These days we have satellites. We know weather patterns and navigation is a solved problem. Also we've mapped ocean currents. This makes sailing a lot more predictable than it used to be.