Image credit: TU Delft

Delft University of Technology

Image credit: TU Delft

Delft University of Technology

The research team at TU Delft is part of the section of Wind Energy of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering and includes Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellows Mikko Folkersma, Sebastian Rapp, Ashwin Candade (transferred in 2019 from consortium member Enerkíte GmbH) and Paul Thedens (working since 2019 at associated partner Skysails Power GmbH), PhD researchers Mark Schelbergen (EU H2020 project REACH), Navi Rajan (EU FP7 project NUMIWING), Volkan Salma (working at ESA-ESTEC) and their advisers Dr. Roland Schmehl and Dr. Axelle Viré. The team has access to scientific staff and research infrastructure. This will include the wind tunnels of the faculty, of which the largest, the Open Jet Facility, can fit scaled-down kite of 2 m span wing span. Custom-developed pressure measurement strips for experimental analysis of flexible membrane wings. Computational facilities include a cluster with 1000 cores of 4.5 TB RAM memory (target is 4 GB RAM/core), mostly connected through infiniband. The Kite Power Research Group currently comprises 3 PhD researchers and 14 graduate researchers. Since January 2010, the team is operating a 20 kW prototype system which is equipped with a 25 m² kite and a complete sensor platform to support the parallel research activities. Two test sites, the former airfield Valkenburg and the Maasvlakte2 harbour area, can be used through rental agreements. The high tech entrepreneurs centre YES!Delft is available to support commercial spin-off activities.

Avatar
Roland Schmehl
Associate Professor

Interested in multi-disciplinary research and computational fluid dynamics.

Related