38 Joseph Coleman Mobile & Marine Robotics Research Centre Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering University of Limerick Limerick Ireland Joseph.coleman@ul.ie Daniel.toal@ul.ie www.ul.ie
Experimental Developments of a Pumping Mode Kite
Power Demonstrator with Non-reversing Generator.
Joseph Coleman, Hammad Ahmad, Daniel ToalUniversity of Limerick
This presentation outlines the recent developments of the Univer-sity of Limerick airborne wind energy project using soft kites. The results of experimental tests from an 8kW pumping mode AWE system are presented. The system ground station utilises a non-reversing generator, with dedicated recovery motor. The tasks of power generation (reel-out phase) and tether recovery (reel – in phase) are electrically and mechanically separated through an arrangement of clutches. The system hardware is briefly dis-cussed and an analysis of computational timing budgets for the
implementation of advanced control strategies (LQR, MPC and control allocation) on a real time operating system is presented. Simulation work of a novel AWE farm electrical power take off design approach is presented. Through the use of directly inter-connected, non-reversing synchronous generators a continuous power supply can be achieved from several pumping mode gen-erators. This arrangement in has been simulated in a small AWE wind farm arrangement. Encouraging results of these simulations are presented.