Viability assessment of a rigid wing airborne wind energy pumping system

Abstract

Airborne wind energy is an emerging technology that is capable of harvesting wind energy by flying crosswind flight patterns with a tethered aircraft. Several companies are trying to scale-up their concept in order to be competitive in the energy market. However, the scaling process requires numerous iterations and trade-offs among the different components in terms of requirements that have to satisfy both technological and economical viability. In this paper, we show how to deal with this task by means of an optimal control approach combined with statistical analysis based on the established methods for conventional Wind Energy Conversion Systems. This approach is applied to a rigid wing pumping mode AWE System built by Ampyx Power B.V.