Flight Anomaly Detection for Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Volkan Salma,Roland Schmehl

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1618/3/032021

Abstract

Airborne wind energy (AWE) systems use tethered flying devices to harvest wind energy beyond the height range accessible to tower-based turbines. AWE systems can produce the electric energy with a lower cost by operating in high altitudes where the wind regime is more stable and stronger. For the commercialization of AWE, system reliability and safety have become crucially important. To reach required availability and safety levels, we adapted an fault detection, isolation and recovery (FDIR) architecture from space industry. This work focuses on, “flight anomaly detection” layer of the FDIR. Tests verifies that proposed architecture is capable of detecting flight anomalies without generating false alarms.

Highlights

Airborne wind energy (AWE) systems use tethered flying devices to harvest wind energy from higher altitudes, which are not accessible by conventional tower-based wind turbines
AWE systems can produce the electric energy with a lower cost by operating in high altitudes where the wind regime is more stable and stronger
This study proposes an FDIR approach for airborne wind energy systems to reach the commercially required reliability and safety levels

Summary

Introduction

Airborne wind energy (AWE) systems use tethered flying devices to harvest wind energy from higher altitudes, which are not accessible by conventional tower-based wind turbines. While the use of a tensile support structure greatly reduces the material effort and investment costs for energy generation, the use of a flying system component poses a major challenge on the control system, especially in the light of long-term operation in an unsteady turbulent wind environment [17]. Current AWE prototypes have reached power ratings of up to several hundred kilowatts and companies are aiming at long-term operation to be able to commercialize the products [8, 13]. For the successful commercialization, designing a reliable, operationally robust and safe AWE system has become one of the main engineering challenges in the field.

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Conclusion