Experimental trial of a Rotary airborne wind energy system (10 December 2016)
Christof Beaupoil Founder someAWE.org
Edil Marina Olcina 7 03540 Alicante
Spain
christof.beaupoil@gmail.com www.someAWE.org
Rotary Airborne Wind Energy Systems with Ground Based Power Generation:
Overview and Practical Experiences
Christof Beaupoil someAWE.org
Rotary airborne wind energy systems that use rotors sim-ilar to conventional wind turbines and ground based gen-erators combine some of the known benefits of cross-wind kite power systems with potential additional ben-efits such as continuous energy generation and passive control.
The author provides an overview of rotary designs in lit-erature and practice. This includes different methods for power transmission (torsion, reel in/out, etc.), rotor de-signs (rigid blades, soft wings, number of blades, stacked rotors, etc.), hub designs (fixed vs variable pitch) and cheap sources for lift and passive control.
Airborne wind energy systems without crosswind motion typically have a bad power/blade area ratio. The author discusses a rotor design that can alleviate this disadvan-tage. It treats the blades of the rotary wing as indepen-dent airborne wings that are only connected for easier
control and launch. The airfoils start at some distance from the hub thus achieving high tip speeds with smaller blade area than conventional rotors.
Practical experiences with a torsion based rigid blade ro-tary airborne wind energy system are being shared. The author discusses the design rationale, lessons learned, successes and dead ends [1,2,3].
References:
[1] C. Beaupoil: "Update on the OTS design", 28 October 2016. http://www.someawe.org/blog/25/update-on-the-ots-design [2] C. Beaupoil: "Setting up and launch of the 250W OTS Airborne Wind Energy System".https://youtu.be/S4mLAAnT21A
[3] C. Beaupoil: "250W OTS Airborne Wind Energy System - making power - then failing".https://youtu.be/LLzBc4MmS3M
