Kitepower Systems rigid wing

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First rigid wing with more bridling Iā€™ve seen.
(Except the one I built with 6m span which I threw out before it was even fully assembled.)

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Its an interesting design for sure. From what I see they have:

  • bridling on a fixed wing
  • direct winch to kite connection
  • some kind of damping on the platform?
  • the two wings they always had. I seem to remember one for production and one for return phase
  • rotating winches AND rotating groundstation (at least three rotating high power devices in addition to the winches themselves)
  • quad propeller VTOL on two fuselages

I think the bridle and the ā€œantibridleā€ are the most interesting aspects of this design

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Pioneering capability to crash two rigid-wing kiteplanes at the same time :slight_smile:

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Agreed. It seems while many companies are struggling to deliver a one kite rigid wing system, the newcomers in the venture capital business need to Ā«up the anteĀ» by starting with multiple wings before having mastered a single one. My guess is that these companies will eventually try to market a single wing unit before multi wing units are designed. By that time, perhaps Makani, Ampyx and Kitemill will also have the capability to go multi wing if they desire so

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@PierreB Your main argument for rotating vs. yo-yo seems to be the intermittency of yo-yo. Reeling in phase of yo-yo is probably much shorter than generating phase. (Does anyone have numbers on that?) What do you think about the approach of more than one yo-yo kite?

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As I wrote on some previous messages (and as you know) the implementation of several yoyo kites with gaps would allow safe temporary storage material. But the management, although possible, could be a not trivial task.

Generally my main argument is the land/space use, that rather concerns rotating vs crosswind systems and that can be achieved using torque (flygen or torque transfer) or yoyo methods. Rotating systems are less efficient than crosswind systems excepted if (like @Rodread does) the wings are spaced enough in order to sweep more. In the other hand rotating systems use far less land/space per power unity thanks to its constrained path.

For the land/use concern (crosswind and rotating kites), yoyo systems use also more space as the swept area goes up downwind. And its efficiency per swept area being limited to 4/27, land/space use is potentially higher than for a torque system.

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