Cascaded Pumping Cycle Control for Rigid Wing Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Cascaded Pumping Cycle Control for Rigid Wing Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Rapp, S. (TU Delft Wind Energy)
Schmehl, R. (TU Delft Wind Energy)
Oland, Espen (Kitemill)
Haas, Thomas (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

2019

Airborne wind energy is an emerging technology that uses tethered unmanned aerial vehicles for harvesting wind energy at altitudes higher than conventional towered wind turbines. To make the technology competitive to other renewable energy technologies a reliable control system is required that allows autonomously operating the system throughout all phases of flight. In the present work a cascaded nonlinear control scheme for reliable pumping cycle control of a rigid wing airborne wind energy system is proposed. The high-level control strategy in the form of a state machine as well as the flight controller consisting of path-following guidance and control, attitude, and rate loop is presented along with a winch controller for tether force tracking. Amathematical model for an existing prototype will be derived, and results from a simulation study will be used to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed concept in the presence of turbulence and wind gusts.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:41de657f-2909-4e66-a412-549c259eb5d6

https://doi.org/10.2514/1.G004246

0731-5090

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics: devoted to the technology of dynamics and control, 42 (11), 2456-2473

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

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© 2019 S. Rapp, R. Schmehl, Espen Oland, Thomas Haas