KiteGen STEM Off-shore

By Massimo Ippolito, August 10, 2009 9:45 pm

At deep sea, wind availability is generally higher, both in terms of speed and hours, in comparison with ground or coastal areas. This notwithstanding, the installation of windmills on board floating platforms for deep offshore energy conversion is a difficult task because of the high thrust and moment generated by the windmill on the platform during operations.
Solutions to exploit deep offshore wind energy have been proposed by several competitors. Nevertheless, because of the enormous technical difficulties, it seems there is only a few (and costly) existing prototypes.
KiteGen overcomes this inherent problem: the position of the centre of mass of the generator is really close to the platform deck and the direction of the main loads (represented by the mechanical pull acting on the cables), practically passing through the centre of mass of the generator, greatly reduce the infrastructure costs.
The KiteGen take-off tower can in fact be extremely slender and light and can be oriented and lowered after the rare take-off and landing procedures, limited to the first start-up of the plant, to the periodical maintenance of the system and to extreme weather conditions. Both floating and mooring systems may be many times lighter than in other traditional wind generator: like a Ju-do wrestler KiteGen uses the wind’s strength for energy production, while traditional windmills only arm wrestle with it.

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