Whose fragmentary Google Drive is that?? Those drawings of mine are old and mostly obsolete and do not represent the current ongoing progression of my thinking. There are thousands more drawings on better sites. Its as if Ortho-Kite-Bunch is as far as you ever got. My progressing thinking about kite networks is represented by metamaterial science as developed in the last five years or so.
Why did you start the MAWES topic if Kite Networks was already going? It too bad Moderators think topics like Kite Networks must be opened and closed on some sort of intentional limit rather than on the expectation that fresh insight can happen anytime.
Under formal network topological classification, all MAWES are Networks. For example, the paper cited describes a MAWES of peer-to-peer network topology.
Hopefully many fruitful topics will get started on the subjects, focusing on different aspects of them or revisiting old ideas again.
One can see the architectures discussed are not the same, or the focus of the topics is not the same, so they deserve separate topics I think. Maybe the topic titles could be edited if the distinction is unclear. A discussion on classification perhaps is another discussion for another topic.
Indeed architectures discussed are not the same although they also contain several connected kites. It is why several topics are used. I gather them in a comment.
I like the term MAWES
(Not least because it is used on the island to describe less towny folks on the North end and West side)
I think to insist multi-kite implies one set of multi-kite configurations would be wrong.
multi-kite rotor yo-yo
multi-kite network lifter
multi-kite mechanical drag mode rotor
multi-kite flygen drag mode
multi-kite laddermill or spider-mill (if one ever gets built)
multi-kite arches and stacks have existed for many years.
There are several sorts of MAWES. And also there are also various purposes and concerns. So IMHO several topics with some links between them can facilitate the understanding.
Two complementary simulators aimed at the dynamic analysis of airborne wind energy systems based on multi-aircraft congurations are presented. The rst model considers a train of stacked aircraft linked among them by two inelastic and massless tethers with no aerodynamic drag. The architecture of the mechanical system in the second simulator is congurable, as long as the system is made of a set of aircraft linked by an arbitrary number of elastic tethers. In both cases, the aircraft are modeled as rigid bodies. An analysis of the symmetric equilibrium state and the corresponding normal modes of a train (stacked conguration) of aircraft was carried out. It revealed that the higher the position of the aircraft in the train, the more they participate in the longitudinal modes. However, all the aircraft roughly participate equally in the lateral-directional modes. Tether inertial and aerodynamic drag eects increase the equilibrium angles of attack of the aircraft and the tether tension at the attachment points. The potential applications and computational performance of the two codes are discussed.
Talking of multi-kites…
An obvious question in wind energy is
OK a 3 blade rotor makes power, Will more blades make more power?
Fair
My next system will be 3 rotors x 5 blade rings 15 blades
So obviously I’m in the yes camp…
However this only works with certain caveats for efficiency sakes.
Open rotors, blade solidity, foil choice, tip speed ratio and more all make a huge difference.
All I can say right now is that the rules will be different for AWE compared to traditional windmills. We get a larger swept area for free, and then we cant/dont need to attain that highest efficiency. My guess is AWE is more flexible, and probably more difficult to get right.
As for the scaling of rotary networks… Just to go over this again.
here’s what my model says the shape of a soft line network flying 4 layers of 6 standard L/D=7 kite blades will look
red - green line colour scale is relative line strain.
sets of arrows are relative force vectors coloured per line to make it clearer.
The lesson for me is. Fly any kite in a circle and the tether flies in a cone.
The corollary is How do you make a tether fly in a cone shape? Attach a circle flying kite to it.
How can you make use of a tether which flies a cone shape? Truncate the bottom of the cone so that it is forced to fly a circular track.
Multi-kite airborne wind energy systems (MAWES) connect two or more equivalent kites via secondary tethers to a main tether. As the kites orbit around the main tether, the MAWES can produce power as the main tether reels-in and out, turning a generator.
It looks like MAWES could be related to crosswind kites flying a loop, so something not too far from some rotary devices at least considering the upper part of the device.