Rigid-wing ground-gen airborne wind energy systems (AWES) fly complex trajectories. This therefore calls for accurate modeling of the dynamics and for advanced control. Flying in atmospheric conditions also requires a high fidelity modeling of the turbulent scales. In the present work, we aim to develop a LES framework to study AWES in turbulent winds and assess the robustness of the controller against flow perturbations. The toolbox AWEbox is used for trajectory generation and control. Here the device is flown with a closed-loop controller using a 6-DOF aircraft mode. A rigid wing AWES is considered and is modeled using an actuator line (AL) based aircraft model for the wing. The model is used to study the behavior of controlled AWES when flying in turbulent atmospheric flows; also with shear as for the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The performances are then compared to those from the idealized conditions, evaluated with AWEbox, and were found to match well with the reference.
Crismer, J.-B., & et al. (2024). Investigation of controlled AWES flying in turbulent atmospheric conditions using Large Eddy Simulation. Airborne Wind Energy Conference 2024, Madrid, Spain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239722