| AWESCO - Airborne Wind Energy System Modelling, Control and Optimisation

Roland Schmehl

Associate Professor

Airborne Wind Energy Group

Faculty of Aerospace Engineering

Delft University of Technology

Dr. Roland Schmehl is head of the Airborne Wind Energy research group at Delft University of Technology. He is coordinator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network AWESCO and the “Fast Track to Innovation” project REACH, both funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. In 2016 he cofounded the start-up company Kitepower together with Johannes Peschel, the current CEO of the company. His research interests are airborne wind energy in general and aeroelasticity of tethered membrane wings and fixed-wing aircraft in particular. He is a founding member of Airborne Wind Europe and chairs the Airborne Wind Energy Committee of the European Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE). He has edited two textbooks about airborne wind energy that were published with Springer in 2013 and 2018. He presented airborne wind energy at the TEDxDelft 2012. Before getting involved with airborne wind energy, he worked as software architect at TNO Automotive Safety Solutions BV, now a subsidiary of Siemens, developing a computational fluid dynamic solver for airbag deployment in crash simulations, and as post-doc and research engineer at the European Space Agency, investigating a startup anomaly of the Ariane 5 upper stage engine and assessing the explosion risk during reentry of the automated transfer vehicle (ATV).

Interests

Computational Fluid Dynamics
Fluid Structure Interaction
Aeroelasticity

Education

PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics, 2003

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
MSc in Mechanical Engineering, 1994

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
BSc in Mechanical Engineering, 1992

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Publications in AWESCO

Mark Schelbergen, Peter C. Kalverla, Roland Schmehl, Simon J. Watson (2020). Clustering wind profile shapes to estimate airborne wind energy production. Wind Energy Science Discussions.