Flight Anomaly Detection for Airborne Wind Energy Systems

Abstract

Airborne wind energy (AWE) systems use tethered flying devices to harvest wind energy beyond the height range accessible to tower-based turbines. AWE systems can produce the electric energy with a lower cost by operating in high altitudes where the wind regime is more stable and stronger. For the commercialization of AWE, system reliability and safety have become crucially important. To reach required availability and safety levels, we adapted an fault detection, isolation and recovery (FDIR) architecture from space industry. This work focuses on, "flight anomaly detection" layer of the FDIR. Tests verifies that proposed architecture is capable of detecting flight anomalies without generating false alarms.