Joe touched on free-flight RAT gliders. There have long been small design studies of free-flying energy gliders with generator turbines. My approach in the late eighties was to ridge-soar in frontal mountain waves to make power. The glider composite structure was envisioned as an aluminum sandwich supercapacitor that instantly discharged every time trailing conductive whiskers did touch-and-go at the bottom of a constant looping flight pattern. No tether was involved. A far more powerful mountain flight mode for this sort of RAT glider has emerged: Lee-ridge based Dynamic soaring (soaring without thermals), which allows RC gliders to reach speeds well over 400 mph. We now have far better capacitors and batteries to consider for charge-discharge cycling.

Reliability of such an AWECS will likely require decades to attain, but what a prize, to eliminate conductive tethers and tap the baddest wind-shears!

CoolIP                       ~Dave Santos             Nov. 22, 2010        M2648

Comment and development of this topic will be occurring here.       
All, send notes, drawings, and photographs!

Terms and aspects:   

• dynamic soaring           

Related:

• Taras Kiceniuk, Jr.
• Gary Osoba
• RAT
•  

Commentary is welcome:

• Mine the shears and spark-off-load the gain ...             JoeF
• That brings to mind a tethered AWECS flygen that aloft charges supercapacitor and then swoops down to drag whiskers to off-load charge to ground supercapacitors; then the TFEG swoops up again to mine the wind again.  No conductive tether, but a kite tether is used.   M2649 JoeF
• free-flight non-tethered FEG using dynamic soaring techniques            JoeF 
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