Development of a Silent Power Supply for an Airborne

Control Unit for Kite Power Applications

Candidate: Bas Van Den Kieboom (4114752)
Currently conventional Wind turbines are one of the main
power source in the renewable energy landscape. One of the
limiting factor for wind turbines is their height due to structural
limit. Enevate will solve this problem by using lightweight kites
that will replace the wing tips of a wind turbine (last 20% of the
blade). These lightweight kite can go up to 600 m where the
velocity of the wind is much higher and there is a better chance
of extracting more power. To generate energy at this altitude
the kite will fly to this altitude in a figure of eight motion. To
steer the kite, the kite is equipped with a Kite Control Unit
(KCU). The problem with this KCU is the batteries last for only 3
hours which is too short for full autonomous flight.

Figure 1: KCU with airborne wind turbine

mount

To solve this problem this thesis will focus on designing a

variable speed mini wind turbine. Since the configuration will
be a direct drive wind turbine the RPM will be high (in the order
of 10000 rev/min). Since the RPM is high there is a chance that
the tip will have compressibility effect which also needs to be
taken in to account during the design. The designing procedure
will be done by making an initial design with a Blade Element
Momentum theory code and this design will be verified by the
use of a Lifting Line code.

Enevates system is a relatively silent concept and for this

reason the wind turbine has to be designed such that noise is minimal. This will be done by coupling
a semi-empirical noise prediction model to the lifting line or BEM code. For the final design different
tip design will be considered (for example sword tips).
At the end of this thesis the design and software should be validated in a wind tunnel and see if it is
possible to design small wind turbines with the use of BEM and lifting line codes. And second it
needs to be validated if the semi-empirical model for noise prediction can be used for predicting the
sound level for small fast spinning wind turbines.
Thus the study aims at answering if it is possible to use BEM code and lifting line code to design a
mini fast spinning wind turbine. And can a semi- empirical noise prediction model be used for
predicting the noise of wind turbine.
Supervisor: -) Dr.-ing. R. Schmehl (TU Delft)
-) Ir. W.A. Timmer (TU Delft)

Keywords: Kite energy, Wind turbine design,

Wind turbine noise