Kites are associated with leisure and fun. But a new European project has transformed their use in a very innovative fashion. The venture called the KitVes project will use high-altitude kites to partly power cargo ships and other seagoing vessels. The three-year venture that commenced last year is supported by Swiss researchers and uses kites to harness wind power to supplement ships’ propulsion systems.
Sequoia Automation, an Italian company, is behind the European Union-funded project that generates power to support onboard auxiliary services, like air conditioning and electronic equipment. The kites work by flying at high altitudes and trapping wind to cause tension that unwinds the cable, which ultimately make an electrical generator rotate. The process uses 100m2 kites that fly at an altitude of 1,000 meters.
It is quite interesting to see that the kite wings will have embedded electronic sensors that will track the data corresponding the position, acceleration and orientation, which can be sent to a control unit on the boat. If we believe the information given by the KitVes website, the project is capable of generating power between 60 kilowatts and 30 megawatts for each ship.
The Arc Engineering College, one of the nine European universities and partners working on the venture, is responsible for three specific areas of the KitVes project. Apart from the college, researchers at Le Locle will also carry out tests on the resistance of polyethylene cables used on the kites. They will also formulate a computerized mathematical model of all possible movements of the kite, cables and motors, to be able to predict their behavior.