Rotary Kite Turbine Development
Roderick Read, Windswept and Interesting Ltd
You can get a copy of my slides here…
I wish I’d been a bit better at rendering 3d before the conference… Might have put this in
A kite turbine with the lines enhanced
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Here’s something which hasn’t been mentioned a lot about Kite Turbine stacking.
They have a weird relationship with cos cubed
Normally in AWES as we increase elevation, we have less disk presented to the wind.
Makes sense, the blades (rotor plane) are tilted.
But what happens if you have stacked your rotors one on top of the next…?
At 0 elevation, only the first rotor see clean wind… So we can discount the occluded areas from the downwind rotors.
As we increase the elevation the total amount of rotor disk exposed to the wind increases, up until around 31 ish degrees in this configuration… oh and on review, another maxima grows at higher elevation as the disks uncross
See
There are subtitles to explain what’s going on.
Also
There is a different calculation being done for the occluded areas being projected down (top area only) vs the areas being projected back (full exposure counted) Which system will be better? Why?
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If you give a number to the power in an occluded area, you can optimize for power. Anyways look like something that may want to be run through CFD
Also longer tethers will help…
But it’s always more complex than that… This is AWES
altitude effects, line drag, torsional rigidity loss, ground use requirements…
This is 100% optimal already because you can bodge it in a garage and fly it & smile at it in a short time
This is something that real-life data would help with. So also something that eventually will solve itself
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I couldn’t resist a bit of cleaning (the househusband side of my work taking over again)
The model is a lot neater now and easier to follow
In better HD and you have a commentary.
