Design of Airborne Wind Energy Airfoils MSc. Candidate: Erik Kroon Supervisor: Gael de Oliveira Andrade Over forty years ago Loyd proposed to harvest wind energy using crosswind airborne devices. Currently more than a combined total of 50 research groups and companies are developing Airborne Wind Energy systems. There are many varieties among the Airborne Wind Energy systems but most of these are converging towards using tethered aircraft that either generate electricity on board the aircraft by means of a turbine or on the ground by converting the mechanical power into electricity. Figure 1:Tethered aircraft with on the ground and onboard power generation [1] The research groups and companies currently use existing airfoils from the flight and conventional wind energy industries. These airfoils are however not optimal for Airborne Wind Energy. This is due to the fact that the airfoils are designed with different goals in mind than those that Airborne Wind Energy requires. A quick example is that airfoils for wind turbine and aircraft are not designed for tethered flight where the tether is a major drag contribution. As such the objective of this MSc. Thesis is to investigate what the driving requirements are behind Airborne Wind Energy and translating these into objective functions which can be used by an advanced airfoil optimization framework to generate a collection of candidate airfoils. References: [1] Cherubini, A., Papini, A., Vertechy, R., and Fontana, M., “Airborne Wind Energy Systems: A review of the technologies,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2015. .