Death to "Soft vs rigid"

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The modern power kite evolved from rigid wings. Jalbert copied his Beechcraft wing. Evolving in the other direction is backwards. Evolve in a cave, lose your vision.

Regarding hybrid rigid-soft wing networks: there is the small personal AWES scale of rigid power wings around 3-5m paired to soft lifter kites of similar mass, that make great sense.

For the largest energy kites, soft wing design will tend to predominate, for all the well-known reasons. What are advantages or necessity is there for comparatively tiny rigid wings in a network?

Maybe there is a place for vast networks of tiny rigid wings, but all the thin kitelines between them would be easy to mess up. Fewer thicker ropes are favored.

The golden ticket for rigid AWE wings is vast flocks of small untethered IFOs. These could coexist with or end an era of giant soft wing AWES domination.

Again, “Death to “Soft vs. Rigid”” is about using each wing design alternative in its proper places.

86

I tend to think that in the field of wind energy production and transmission in the broad sense, we have devices made either of rigid elements (a wind turbine includes rigid blades on a rigid mast), or of flexible elements (sails with ropes).

In its simplified form an AWES is a tethered kite. A tether is a soft thing. Generally a kite is also a soft thing. In the other hand if the kite is rigid, the whole can be mismatched: it is like the marriage of the carp and the rabbit. In practice, even if the rigid wing performs very well, the tether will negate that performance, lowing the whole L/D ratio as it gets longer, thus when the AWES becomes useful by harnessing high altitude winds.

In contrast, tethered rotors might be able to succeed to some extent, in combining flexible and rigid elements.