The seminar is free to attend but registration is required – please email the organizers to receive an invitation

Abstract

Airborne Wind Energy is the technology of harvesting wind energy with a tethered autonomous aircraft. Conceived in the late 1970’s, today it is a growing field where researchers and developers in academia and industry have reached significant milestones. These efforts are motivated by the promise of a renewable energy technology with high availability, capable to deliver large amounts of clean energy at lower costs than fossil sources. Yet, the road to commercialization still presents important risks. On the technological side, mitigating these imply advancing our knowledge in several domains, among which aerodynamics, control and power management are crucial. The talk will review the main concepts of airborne wind energy and present its current state of play, show some of the accomplished results, and point to the open research topics in this field.

Bio

Professor Lorenzo Fagiano is associate professor of automation and control engineering at the Politecnico di Milano since 2016. He received the Ph.D. in Information and Systems Engineering in 2009 from Politecnico di Torino. From 2010 to 2013 he held positions at UC Santa Barbara and ETH Zurich, and from 2013 to 2016 he was with ABB Corporate Research, Switzerland. He is recipient of the European Control Award 2019, of the Mission Innovation Champion award 2019, of two Marie Curie fellowships, of the 2011 IEEE Transactions on Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award, and of the 2010 ENI award “Debut in Research” prize. He co-authored 130 papers in international journals and conference proceedings, and he is co-founder of two start-up companies.