Abstract—This paper presents the design, modeling and development of a novel airborne wind turbine composed of a tethered air dam supporting an embedded wind power generator, denoted as WinDam, which extracts energy from wind blowing between 50 and 300 m above the ground. The power generation and lift systems are integrated in this design; they do rely on each other for operation and design. The lift system is an air flyer with longitudinal control, lateral control and attack angle control capabilities. The tether serves to both anchor the device and to transmit electricity to the ground. The good matching between experimental data, collected by using an embedded system installed on the small-scale WinDam prototype, compared to computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis results reveal that WinDam can increase the flow stream wind velocity up to 193% at the location of generator due to low-pressure region behind the kite. Finally, WinDam has the potential to overcome the limits of the actual wind turbines and to provide large quantities of renewable energy.
Index Terms—Airborne wind energy, high-altitude wind energy, WinDam, wind energy.
Ken Nagasaka is with Tokyo University of A & T, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: bahman@cc.tuat.ac.jp).
Amin Amini is with Purdue School of Eng. & Tech., Indiana, USA (e-mail: amin.amini.elec@gmail.com).
Mohammad V. Momeni is with Shahid Beheshti Univ. Tehran, Iran.
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Cite:Ken Nagasaka, Amin Amini, and Mohammad Mehdi Vaez Momeni, "WinDam: A Novel Airborne Wind Turbine," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 243-247, 2017.
