Towards Flight Testing of Remotely Controlled Surfkites for Wind Energy Generation

Non-powered flight vehicles such as kites can provide a means of transmitting wind energy from higher altitudes to the ground via tethers. Although there is increased world wide interest for systems to extract wind energy from higher altitudes with kites, research into kite properties such as the coefficients and the stability is limited. Such research is required to increase the knowledge on kites, which would enable the design of purpose-built kites for energy extraction. This paper presents one of the concepts for wind energy extraction from high altitudes; the Laddermill. Furthermore it presents the hardware that was built to do such tests, test procedures for kites and early results of testing of commercially available surf kites.