Scaling Airborne Wind Energy Systems for Deployment on Mars

Abstract

Although technologically challenging, airborne wind energy systems have several advantages over conventional wind turbines that make them an interesting option for deployment on Mars. However, the environmental conditions on the red planet are quite different from those on Earth. The atmosphere’s density is about 100 times lower, and gravity is about one-third, which affects the tethered flight operation and harvesting performance of an airborne wind energy system. In this chapter, we investigate in how far the physics of tethered flight differs on the two planets, specifically from the perspective of airborne wind energy harvesting. The derived scaling laws provide a means to systematically adapt a specific system concept to operation on Mars using computation. Sensitivity analyses are conducted for two different sites on Mars, drawing general conclusions about the technical feasibility of using kites for harvesting wind power on the red planet.