A Small-Scale Prototype to Study the Take-Off of Tethered Rigid Aircrafts for Airborne Wind Energy

TL;DR

This paper presents a small-scale prototype designed to facilitate take-off and flight testing of tethered rigid aircrafts for airborne wind energy, integrating control systems for safe and efficient operation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel prototype system with integrated control for tethered aircraft take-off, combining mechanical, electrical, and control components for experimental validation.

Findings

Prototype successfully achieved take-off in experiments.

Experimental results matched theoretical predictions.

System demonstrated effective low-force tether reeling.

Abstract

The design of a prototype to carry out take-off and flight tests with tethered aircrafts is presented. The system features a ground station equipped with a winch and a linear motion system. The motion of these two components is regulated by an automatic control system, whose goal is to accelerate a tethered aircraft to take-off speed using the linear motion system, while reeling-out the tether from the winch with low pulling force and avoiding entanglement. The mechanical, electrical, measurement and control aspects of the prototype are described in detail. Experimental results with a manually-piloted aircraft are presented, showing a good matching with previous theoretical findings.