Abstract
Kitekraft was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from Technical University of Munich. After research on various airborne wind energy topics, incl. concepts, crosswind kite power with onboard generation (“drag power”), with a boxplane airframe kite made from rigid materials, has been selected as the most promising concept for an industrial product. The technology has been developed step by step towards market requirements. The main advances, so far, have been (i) the development and validation of required key features, e.g., a high-lift multi-element airfoil, the ground station with autonomous undocking and docking mechanisms, or the power electronics down to a grid connection, and (ii) the increase of the robustness for safe, reliable, autonomous operation in all phases. The latter includes the selection and validation of low-cost and reliable sensors as well as redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms, such that the system remains always in a safe state, even during component failures (“no single point of failure”), i.e. the kite remains always able to perform a hover-landing on the ground station. The photo shows the demonstrator in flight shortly after take-off from the ground station during a test flight in October 2023. The ground station has a 30kVA bidirectional connection to the public grid and can supply the kite during hover phases and feed power into the grid during figure-8 flight. In this talk, further details on achieved milestones, videos, telemetry data, and plans are discussed.
Florian Bauer
CTO and Cofounder
Passionate engineer and researcher developing a new type of wind power plants – kite power plants.
