Airborne Wind Energy is a technology where wind energy is harvested with tethered flying devices. Kitepower uses flexible leading edge inflatable kites, but these have a scaling disadvantage in that they become heavier with size. A single skin kite has the potential of negating this disadvantage while at the same time being more aerodynamically efficient.
An airfoil of this type is therefore investigated using Computational Fluid Dynamics and optimized using Surrogate Modelling techniques.
A hybrid mesh was generated with hyperbolic extrusion and triangulation. The RANS solver that was used produced good results.
The results of the optimization were unsatisfactory. The parametrization did not provide enough local control and unique airfoil shapes. The surrogate modelling approach is promising due to the computationally expensive CFD analyses.