How should i control the rigid wing direction? Tether Length, Aileron, or Rotor Resistance

Engineering System Design
1

Hi,

I am new to this, but I want to develop my own fly-gen rigid kite, and I hoped that you had some good advice before I start building.

As I only have limited experience, I would prefer to keep it simple and have as few moving parts as possible.

What is your preferred way to control rigid wings, and do you have other ideas?

How should i control the kite-direction

2

You might as well consider a rudder (if not limited to a flying wing).

Ailerons might be used differently depending on their locations and tether/bridles arrangement.

  • Providing rolling moment and roll with single tether attachment point close to the wing (equivalent to change of bridle length).
  • Providing lateral force (depending on wing dihedra/curvature relative to a virtual circle with center at single tether attachment point and radius given by bridle length)
  • Providing drag on one side which can yaw the kite
  • Providing lateral lift which can yaw the kite if the wing is swept back (close to rudder working principle)

If you are using rotor anyway for flygen generation, rotor resistance can enable to reduce number of actuators, and is probably a good starting point. But you probably want to consider other controls for redundancy.

Bridling enables to share the load to have a wing closer to a soft kite. However it might be hard to scale the force and power requirements to modify it with varying wing speed which can be much higher than wind speed. If you have a generator in the air, it might be ok on the power side, but you still need to be able to develop the force.

Ailerons can enable to extract energy from airspeed to control your wing. Depending on their mode of action, it might lead to other restrictions:

  • less bridling, or more complex use of pulley at attachment point
  • constraints on wing curvature

One point to consider is the varying tether length. This might entail some control reversal issues during launch and recovery.

1 Like
3

Yeah its a difficult choice you-re anyway in the experimental realm, anything is welcome.

What kind/type of kite do you plan to use?

I’d chose what is simpler, that might be rotor brake control. A freewheeling turbine provides most thrust (or drag)

Other than that there-s also 3 and 4 line control, which only changes the angle of the wing or twists it (see revolution kites videos about hat capabilities provides this type of control)

Also ailerons - with the right control and the turbine used for propulsion - would allow some sort of self launch capability makani style , at least in theory

4

Welcome to the forum @Carl_Lassen.
The sketched kite looks to have an anhedral angle, like Enerkite (below) which could perhaps be a model, becoming a sort of fly-gen Enerkite. For the rest, follow the two previous comments.

A video showing details: