Abstract
This paper presents sea trials on a 6-m boat specifically designed for kite propulsion. The kite control was automatic or manual, dynamic or static, depending on the point of sailing. The measurement system recorded boat motion and load generated by the kite. A particular attention was paid to wind measurement with several fixed and mobile locations directly on the kiteboat or in the vicinity. A high resolution weather modelling showed that a classical power law, describing the wind gradient, was not satisfactory to get the wind at kite location. 5-min measurement phases were systematically recorded. In the end, 101 runs were carried out. Data were processed with the phase-averaging method in order to produce reliable and accurate results.
Highlights
The interest of the kite in terms of energy production is highlighted by Loyd in 1980 [1]
Kites are investigated as an auxiliary propulsion device for merchant ship [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]
The first three columns denote the short name of the case, the kite used and the true wind angle βWT
Summary
The interest of the kite in terms of energy production is highlighted by Loyd in 1980 [1]. It is essentially focused on electrical power production [2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. There is a fundamental difference between using a kite to generate electricity and using it for ship propulsion. The kite flies always in dynamic mode (crosswind condition) in the case of electricity production, while flight conditions are varied in the case of ship propulsion. Leloup shows that the static flight is optimal under 50◦
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