ETF Project MAVERICK

MAVERICK is a project funded by the Energy Transition Fund (ETF) of FPS Economy.

The full title is "Measuring, Calibrating and Validating Airborne Wind Energy System Simulation Tools in Offshore Conditions" and the public summary is as follows:

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is an emerging technology that can help Belgium to reach its offshore renewable energy targets, by capturing wind at higher altitude with limited materials and by reusing existing foundations of old wind turbines. Simulation tools are being developed to analyze these new devices, but there is no suitable validation data available. Therefore, MAVERICK will perform a flight demonstration campaign with a large (12m wingspan) existing AWE system, to generate data to validate the tools and perform fundamental studies for offshore repowering with AWE systems.

It is a collaboration between the Fluid Mechanics team and Dynamic Design Lab (D2LAB) of the Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering at UGent, the Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics (TFL) division of the Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering (IMMC) at UCLouvain, and Kiteswarms, with subcontracting to Mozaero.

News

2025 06 25: Multiple presentations in the Airborne Wind Energy minisymposium at Wind Energy Science (WESC) in Nantes.
2025 03 24: Flight test campaign in Oostwold is topic of a news article.
2025 03 21: Flight test campaign in Oostwold ongoing!
2024 10 03: Kick-off in Breda, with presentations, discussion and a photo of the team with AP3.
2024 10 01: Presentation of MAVERICK at ETF event in Ostend
2024 09 19: Kick-off with representatives from FPS Economy
2024 06 05: MAVERICK has been granted

Research

The work packages with the research are summarized by the following figure.

The timeline is show in the following chart:

Publications

Videos

Coming soon