High-fidelity Simulation and Control of a Centrifugally-stiffened Airborne Wind Energy System

Multi-kite Airborne Wind Energy systems harvest wind energy through several kites and tethers. While they are predicted to yield significantly higher power output than single-kite systems, they are also considered more complex, and practical real-world designs have yet to appear. We propose a novel multi-kite system in which the kites are constrained to orbit each other by tethers connecting their inner wingtips. The centrifugal stiffening in this arrangement results in a quasi-rigid rotor that transmits mechanical power to the ground-based generator by pulling out a Y-shaped tether. Such a system is modeled with high fidelity and controlled with simple means. This shows that the proposed architecture is less complex than commonly thought and has important advantages over previously proposed single-kite systems.