AWE Power Curves

[PierreB]

About scaling of flexible kites:

Scalability of Skysails, an outsider point of view

Here some quick sources: From Mikko Folkersma’s PhD thesis Figure 2.5 shows a comparison of the mass per projected area and the scaling of the commercial surf kites. Note that in kite surfing, the designed traction force of the kite remains approximately constant as the kite surface area grows. The larger kite designs are for lower wind velocities, and therefore the tensile forces in the membrane remain rather constant. While in AWE, scaling up aims to generate higher traction force, and ther…

@rschmehl

From Paulig et al (2013) we know

The specific weight of 160 to 320 m2 kites is around 0.5–0.6 kg/m2

which is in line with the V3 kite (I am not sure whether Skysails refers to flat or projected area). But this at least indicates that in this size range, the mass of the wing scales linearly with the wing surface area.

I do acknowledge that this is only a very rough analysis and I know that kites are increasingly reinforced and/or bridle lines added to increase the wing loading. So, a slightly steeper increase of mass than linear should be expected. But still, this is far from a square-cube law.