Hi @AggyAbhishek ,
Short answer: no.
My opinion:
Untethered AWES are an application of (Dynamic) Soaring
This is required viewing for that: BTD10: The 835kph Sailplane and Dynamic Soaring
Now instead of trying to maximize speed, you want to bleed off some of that speed with rotors to convert into electricity.
Let’s try to make the case for a group developing untethered AWES:
- They have a dynamic soaring glider that is currently breaking records and is quick and cheap to manufacture.
- They are sensing the wind shear at the location, with the glider or a ground station, and are able to update the flight path to take advantage of that.
- They are testing autonomous flight and are only crashing once every … days of continuous operation.
- They have a method to launch and land every … minutes and can discharge the batteries quickly.
- Ideally they are also implementing some swarm logic so they can add more gliders to the system.
- They have the ideal location and niche to deploy the system, on a perpetually windy mountainside, and where other solutions like solar don’t make sense.
- They have the people with experience in all of this, especially flight control engineers.
Battery density I don’t think is such an important bottleneck. The flight control is the most difficult part I think, if you are only interested in a demonstrator. The other points become more important if you want to make it somewhat economically viable
A good start would be to buy a cheap (foam) dynamic soaring or discuss launch glider and try to fly it autonomously. After they’ve achieved some significant flight time were they avoided crashing the glider, they could start thinking about adding rotors and generators and the rest.
Untethered AWES does not make much sense if you compare it to its closest relative, tethered flygen. Off the top of my head: much fewer suitable and less accessible locations and potentially lower capacity factor at those locations; even more difficult flight control (although you now have no tether, which makes it easier again), as you’re flying closer to the ground and with that have a higher chance of crashing, and you need to sense and take advantage of the wind shear; needing to launch and land continuously, so a lower flight time and a higher risk of crashing; need for ballast (batteries) so more force needed to keep the glider in the air; without the benefit of the tether, you can expose less of your wing to the wind as otherwise you will fly downwind, so a lower energy potential; in a single loop you are only exposed to high winds adding energy to your glider during part of the loop, again lowering your energy potential.
That said, there could always be niches where it does make sense.
Dynamic soaring for other niches also are unlikely, but are a different question: surveying, transportation,…
I think the field is now still in the stage of basic research, which should be done in universities or by interested individuals or rc plane manufacturers. It is an interesting field that is cheap enough to start in though, if you can avoid crashing your plane too much.
That said, investing in someone buying and experimenting with dynamic soaring gliders would have environmental and societal benefits. The skill is transferable to many other fields, most notably AWES if they decide to pivot. And maybe I am wrong and they are able to find a niche or are just able to advance the field in some way. Flight control, without the tether, could also be easier if they at first refrain from flying too low.