A new field of study has arisen within Wind Energy known as ‘Airborne Wind Energy’ (AWE). Although the concept of AWE has been around for a long time, there has been little development in this field until recently. This thesis adds to this development.

The focus lies on airfoil design in order to improve existing AWE systems and accelerate the field’s growth. To this end the main objectives of this thesis are to identify the goals these airfoils have to meet and to optimise their design with these goals in mind.

A literature study was used to identify the goals and a genetic algorithm was used for the optimisation process. The results from the final designs have been compared to existing airfoils with similar criteria and have been proven to perform better for the identified goals.