Ampyx Powerplane AP-2A1 during free gliding flight with folded launch-assist propellers (23 December 2015)
Sören Sieberling Project Manager Ampyx Power B.V. Lulofsstraat 55 ś Unit 13 2521 AL The Hague The Netherlands soeren@ampyxpower.com www.ampyxpower.com
An Optimal Sizing Tool for Airborne Wind Energy Systems
Giovanni Licitra1,2, Jonas Koenemann1,2, Paul Williams1, Sören Sieberling1, Moritz Diehl2 1Ampyx Power B.V.
2Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK), University of Freiburg
Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is an emerging technology that is capable of harvesting wind energy by flying cross-wind flight patterns with a tethered aircraft. An AWE sys-tem (AWES) is mainly characterized by high power-to-mass ratio, high capacity factors and lower installation costs with respect to conventional wind turbines. Nevertheless, AWES need to be scaled-up in order to be both attractive for investments and competitive in the en-ergy market. Such scaling process requires numerous it-erations and trade-offs among the different components in terms of requirements that have to satisfy both techno-logical and economical viability.
In this paper, we will show an approach that addresses systematically the viability assessment of an AWES for scaling-up purposes via formulation of an optimal control problem (OCP) combined with statistical analysis. More precisely, the patterns are optimized with respect to the average power output for a range of wind speeds; subse-quently the power curve, annual energy production and capacity factor are computed for a given wind distribu-tion [1,2].
The OCPs are solved via the dynamic optimization tool-box openOCL implemented in the Matlab Environment and freely available in [3]. As a matter of example, the rigid wing pumping mode AWES designed by Ampyx Power B.V is used as case study.
Reel-in phase Reel-out phase
Typical optimal pattern for a rigid wing pumping mode AWES.
References:
[1] Licitra, G., Sieberling, S., Engelen, S., Williams, P., Ruiterkamp, R. and Diehl, M., 2016, June. Optimal Control for Minimizing Power Consumption During Holding Patterns for Airborne Wind Energy Pumping System. In Control Conference (ECC), 2016 European (pp. 1574-1579). IEEE.
[2] Licitra, G., Koenemann, J., Horn, G., Williams, P., Ruiterkamp, R. and Diehl, M., 2017, June. Viability Assessment of a Rigid Wing Air-borne Wind Energy Pumping System. In Process Control (PC), 2017. IEEE.
[3] Koenemann, J. openOCL - Dynamic Optimization Toolbox https://www.openocl.org.
