Assessment of a Flying Tethered System Concept for Fluid Stream Energy Exploitation. Numerical Modelling and Early Experimental Tests.

This paper introduces the innovative configuration of a flying vehicle, tethered to a fixed point, equipped with a couple of turbines, to be immersed in a fluid stream for clean energy applications. The system has been developed and tested at the University of Naples, to explore the feasibility of wind and marine current energy exploitation by means of this kind of plants. The authors have developed a numerical dynamic model of a generic tethered vehicle as a support for the design of the above system. A number of experiments have been performed in a towing tank on a test model using a couple of turbines that were previously designed and characterized experimentally. The aim of this paper is to report a comparison between experimental and numerical simulation results.