63 Kurt Geebelen KU Leuven Kasteelpark Arenberg 41 3001 Leuven Belgium kurt.geebelen@mech.kuleuven.be website: http://www.highwind.be
The New Highwind Carousel for Outdoor Rotational Start Experiments
Kurt Geebelen
(Joint work with Andrew Wagner, Mathias Clinckemaillie, Jeroen Stuyts, Wouter Vandermeulen, Dirk Vandepitte, Jan Swevers, Moritz Diehl )
KU Leuven
This poster presents an improved version of an experimental test setup developed within the ERC Highwind project at the University of Leuven. The setup will be used for airborne wind energy (AWE) research that focuses on the automatic control and up of tethered rigid wing systems. Automatic start-ing and landstart-ing of rigid wstart-ing systems that lack on-board pro-pellers can be done using a rotation start. In the rotation start, an arm rotates around a central axis and brings the airplane up to speed. Once the airplane has achieved sufficient speed, the tether can be extended, allowing the airplane to gain al-titude. A transition to crosswind flight is performed when the achieved speed and altitude is high enough.
In contrast to the previous experimental setup, the new car-ousel will rotate a 2 m radius arm 4m above the ground. This carousel has a nominal rotational velocity of 60 rpm at which it can deliver a maximum towing power of 4 kW. Mounted at the heart of the carousel is a winch that rotates with the arm. This winch is driven by a 10 kW motor/generator with a maxi-mum reel in/out velocity of 10 m/s. Furthermore, the carousel is weatherproof and is mounted on a trailer for easy transpor-tation to outdoor flying sites. The airplane that will be used for initial testing on this setup has a wingspan of 3 meters and a surface area of 1 square meter.
The figure to the right shows the new Highwind carousel, which is currently under construction. By the time of the AWEC conference, the winch, arm, and plane will have been completed and installed, and the first round of flight experiments will
