Energy & Green Tech

Startup bets on kitesurf to blow away shipping pollution

Inspired by kitesurfing, French firms want to deploy the same wind technology to propel everything from yachts to cargo ships in order to cut the shipping industry's massive carbon footprint.

Energy & Green Tech

Machine learning could help kites and gliders harvest wind energy

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is a lightweight technology which uses flying devices including kites and gliders to harvest power from the atmosphere. To maximize the energy they extract, these devices need to precisely control ...

Energy & Green Tech

Wind power from the sky

Anyone who has ever steered a child's kite knows the feeling: The wind grips the kite and pulls the string. The string is quickly tensioned, the spindle rotates between the fingers and is difficult to control. The question ...

Kite

A kite is a tethered aircraft. The necessary lift that makes the kite wing fly is generated when air (or in some cases water) flows over and under the kite's wing, producing low pressure above the wing and high pressure below it. This deflection also generates horizontal drag along the direction of the wind. The resultant force vector from the lift and drag force components is opposed by the tension of the one or more lines or tethers. The anchor point of the kite line may be static or moving (e.g., the towing of a kite by a running person, boat, free-falling anchors as in paragliders and fugitive parakites or vehicle).

Kites are usually heavier-than-air, but there is a second category of lighter-than-air kite called a kytoon which may be filled with hydrogen, hot air, methane, or helium; these stay aloft with or without wind; at calm they float; at wind they receive lift from buoyancy and aerodynamic lift. Kytoons have been made in toy-scale as well as military large scale.

Kites may be flown for recreation, art or other practical uses. Sport kites can be flown in aerial ballet, sometimes as part of a competition. Power kites are multi-line steerable kites designed to generate large forces which can be used to power activities such as kite surfing, kite landboarding, kite fishing, kite buggying and a new trend snow kiting. Kites towed behind boats can lift passengers which has had useful military applications in the past.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA