Robust and Stable Periodic Flight of Power Generating Kite Systems in a Turbulent Wind Flow Field

Power-generating kite systems extract energy from the wind by periodically pulling a generator on the ground while flying fast in a crosswind direction. Kite systems are intrinsically unstable, and subject to atmospheric turbulences. As an alternative to closed-loop control, this paper investigates the open-loop stabilization and robustification of a kite system using techniques based on the solution of Lyapunov differential equation. A wind flow is computed as a solution to a time-dependent three dimensional Navier-Stokes equation. Open-loop stable trajectories for the power-generating kite system are computed based on the statistical properties of the wind field, and are robustified with respect to the system constraints. The stability and robustness of the resulting trajectories are assessed by simulating the system using the computed time- and space-dependent turbulent wind flow.