Kitemill is a startup company located at Lista Airport, Farsund. We are developing a novel wind turbine based on a flying kite pulling a tether. We call this Airborne Wind Energy [AWE], and there are several companies and universities working on this. The goal is to produce renewable wind energy with lower material use, with higher capacity factor, with less impact on wildlife, utilizing sites that are not suitable for traditional wind turbines and more.
Ingeborg will be working on integration of a new sensor that Kitemill has purchased and will be mounted on a sting at the front of the wing. The sensor comes in two parts, a pressure scanner unit capable of measuring seven pressures relative to a common reference pressure, then transmitting those pressures to a CAN bus network. The second part is a steel probe with several sensing holes that are connected by tubes to the pressure scanner. The measured differential pressures may be input into a mathematical formula to calculate the airspeed and inflow angle (alpha is angle of attack on the wing, beta is the side slip).
The integration of CAN bus traffic to a C++ microcontroller platform will be provided by Kitemill. Ingeborg will implement the provided mathematical calculations in the C++ code. Then she will perform some experiments to measure the accuracy of the pressure readings. Next, analyze the expected accuracy of alpha, beta and airspeed at different airspeeds, on paper.
Furthermore we will try to perform some experiments on the roof of the company car to verify the accuracy of the measured data. If we can arrange a session to measure this at the wind tunnel in Grimstad, we may try to do that also.
The sensor will be useful for supporting another experiment where the force on propellers are measured, performed by another summer intern, Wolfgang Pilz. Ingeborg will take part in these experiments and provide the alpha, beta and airspeed data to Wolfgang.