High-altitude Wind Energy Generation.
Event details
| Date | 01.03.2011 |
| Hour | 10:15 |
| Speaker | Dr. L. Fagiano, Marie Curie fellow at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. |
| Location |
ME C2 405
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Sustainable energy generation is one of the most urgent challenges that mankind is facing nowadays. Unfortunately, the actual renewable energies are not competitive with respect to fossil sources due to the high costs of the related technologies, their variable and non-uniform availability and their low power density per unit area. Thus, a breakthrough would be needed in renewable energy generation to foster its application and to produce everywhere large quantities of cheap, green energy. Such a radical innovation may be obtained by converting high-altitude wind energy into electricity. The idea, firstly investigated about 30 years ago but only recently developed by some research groups and companies around the world, is to exploit the aerodynamic forces generated by automatically controlled tethered wings. Such wings are able to reach much higher altitudes than the actual wind turbines, where stronger and more constant wind can be found practically everywhere. The generated forces are then converted into mechanical and electrical power by using suitable devices, either onboard or at ground level. Automatic control is a key point of this technology, since the system to be controlled is open loop unstable, highly nonlinear and subject to operational constraints. In this talk, the main characteristics and the potentials of the outlined concept of high-altitude wind energy will be described, and the main results obtained so far in several research projects at Politecnico di Torino, including theoretical analyses, numerical simulations and experimental activities, will be discussed.
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