• Energy Research

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is an emerging technology for the conversion of wind energy into electricity. There are many types of AWE systems, and one of them flies crosswind patterns with a tethered aircraft connected to a generator. The objective is to gain a proper understanding of the unsteady interaction of air and this flexible and dynamic system during operation, which is key to developing viable, large AWE systems. In this work, the effect of wing deformation on an AWE system performing a crosswind flight maneuver was assessed using high-fidelity time-varying fluid–structure interaction simulations. This was performed using a partitioned and explicit approach. A computational structural mechanics (CSM) model of the wing structure was coupled with a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the wing aerodynamics. The Chimera/overset technique combined with an arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) formulation for mesh deformation has been proven to be a robust approach to simulating the motion and deformation of an airborne wind energy system in CFD simulations. The main finding is that wing deformation in crosswind flights increases the symmetry of the spanwise loading. This property could be used in future designs to increase the efficiency of airborne wind energy systems.

AWESCO Wind Field Datasets The present datasets contain time-resolved three-dimensional wind field data computed by means of large-eddy simulations. The atmospheric boundary layer is modelled as pressure driven boundary layer (PDBL) and the computations are performed using the software SPWind developed at KU Leuven. Wind field data is provided for three different roughness classes corresponding to offshore and onshore conditions. For each roughness class, 45 minutes of wind data, sampled every second, is available and stored in HDF5 format for time series of 15 minutes. The file size is approximately 10GB. The data can be accessed using processing scripts provided for both Python and MATLAB. For more information, please read the provided documentation.