Flight Testing, Aerodynamic Parameter Identification and Dynamic Simulation of Rigid and Flexible Kites Applied to Airborne Wind Energy systems

Simulation, state estimation, and aerodynamic parameter identification from in-flight data are actual research topics in AWE [1,2]. This work summarizes the status of four infrastructures developed at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid that are related with them: (i) a portable experimental rig for the acquisition of flight data like kite position, velocity, Euler angles, angular velocity, aerodynamic speed, angle of attack and sideslip angles, tether tensions, and wind velocity, (ii) an estimator of the state of the system, including the aerodynamic force and torque (iii) an optimization algorithm to compute the aerodynamic parameters from the estimated state variables, and (iv) the open-source simulator LAKSA, that contains modules aimed at the dynamic simulation and control of fly-gen and ground-gen generation systems, 2- line acrobatic kites, four-line kitesurf kites, and a train of N stacked kites.