Hey guys, just wanted to point you to some nice footage: https://medium.com/kitekraft/kitekraft-completes-flight-in-figure-eights-c84d787f3715
Hi @floba,
Welcome to the forum Florian. I have been following your fly-gen project for quite some time, because it has a lot of interesting aspects (imho) including High lift coefficient and biplane kite.
Waiting for next tests and data.
Thanks for sharing and congratulations on your results!
I like your approach of going for incremental improvements.
Thanks for sharing further kiteKRAFT success Florian.
From the article…
Our approach to software and hardware and the general kite concept work. Indeed, the kite’s real behavior is very close to our simulation models. The next steps towards a production system are now more incremental improvements instead of risky novel developments.
You’ve always put a very impressive level of engineering analysis into your systems. Looks like it’s paying off. Can’t wait to see the further evolution of your systems and the limits of possible being pushed further yet again.
KiteKRAFT comports a lot of interesting features that were already discussed, such like high lift coefficient biplane among others.
An additional important characteristic is its recyclability. On Kitekraft - Airborne Wind Energy :
Recyclable
Our kites are mostly made of aluminum which can easily be recycled, much better than carbon or glass fiber reinforced plastics, the material conventional wind turbines are mostly made of. Leaving no burden for the future.
I think also that figure-eight is flatter than circular figure, and less subject to lead to (negative) kinetic energy towards the ground making the ascent difficult. So the weight can be less problematic during figure-eight.
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Good point @PierreB
The flat figure 8 (fancy word is Lemniscate)
Does not deviate so far in elevation - there is less mass disadvantage in a larger system - trade off is it requires more yaw control authority to make the steeper turns at the side.
I think kiteKRAFT use the control surfaces on the tail boom / not bridle pulling / maybe both.
They can also use differential turbine drag to make a faster turn.
Considering the speed KiteKRAFT compute at - they can probably get the kite to write Happy Birthday in the sky on special days
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I congratulate Kitekraft on a very impressive flight.
What I would like to see next is maybe flights in real winds. Flying as a drone in low winds is quite different to flying in high winds. We can see that there is little tether force as the kite is rolling a lot when flying the lemniscate. This means that centrifugal and gravity forces are dominating tether tension force.
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Thank you!
We’ll give a few details in upcoming blog posts or on the upcoming the Airborne Wind Energy Conference. What I can say already,is that the dominating force clearly is the lift of the kite’s boxplane main wings. – Stay tuned.
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Congrats! Looks great. I hope I will be able to attend the conference to catch up.