Airborne Wind Energy for Martian Habitats

Renewable energy for Mars habitats is of key interest for future crewed missions. However, the low solar irradiation and low atmospheric pressure on Mars pose serious challenges to exploiting these resources reliably. In this chapter, we investigate the technical feasibility of a soft-kite-based airborne wind energy system and its potential to...

Scaling Airborne Wind Energy Systems for Deployment on Mars

Although technologically challenging, airborne wind energy systems have several advantages over conventional wind turbines that make them an interesting option for deployment on Mars. However, the environmental conditions on the red planet are quite different from those on Earth. The atmosphere’s density is about 100 times lower, and gravity is...

Fast Aero-Structural Model of a Leading-Edge Inflatable Kite

Soft-wing kites for airborne wind-energy harvesting function as flying tensile membrane structures, each of whose shape depends on the aerodynamic load distribution and vice versa. The strong two-way coupling between shape and loading poses a complex fluid-structure interaction problem. Since computational models for such problems do not yet...

Towards Flow-Field Characterization for AWES

Design of an Airborne Wind Energy System for Mars Habitats

Fast Aeroelastic Model of a Leading-Edge Inflatable Kite

Improving Lifting-Line/Vortex-Step Methods for Kite Applications Using 2D Unsteady Thin Airfoil Theory Results

High-Fidelity Tether Models for Airborne Wind Energy

Fast Aeroelastic Model of a Leading-Edge Inflatable Kite

Vortex-model-based Multi-objective Optimization of Winglets for Wind Turbines using Machine Learning

Different Design Driving Load constraints (DDLs), are explored in this work to determine under which constraints and conditions a winglet can have an added value to the wind turbine blade design. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization is used to maximize the rotor's power production while minimizing the flapwise DDLs. Surrogate models, created...

Reference Design and Simulation Framework of a Multi-Megawatt Airborne Wind Energy System

In this paper, we present the design and computational model of a representative multi-megawatt airborne wind energy (AWE) system, together with a simulation framework that accounts for the flight dynamics of the fixed-wing aircraft and the sagging of the tether, combining this with flight control and optimisation strategies to derive the...

Configuration Optimization of a Generic Crosswind Airborne Wind Energy System

Investigation of the Effect of Modeling Different Degrees of Detail in the Key Elements in a Crosswind Kite Wind Energy System