Jelle Poland

About me

I enjoy optimising and that often leads me to ponder on questions like: How can I make my Palak curry more delicious? How can I improve my Crail board grab in kite-surfing? How can I improve my free swimming stroke? How can I increase my work output while working less? I love being active and some of my favourite sports are: hiking, bouldering, swimming, snowboarding and kite-surfing. My creative desires are usually met by drumming, extensive cooking and visiting modern-art museums. I don’t engage with social media much, but you can find me on LinkedIn.

Personal Motivation

In order to understand why I choose to work on this topic, three things are relevant. Firstly, I enjoy a challenge and have found that technical challenges can get me into a flow state, where work feels like play. I find fluid-flows fascinating to watch, which let me to study Aerodynamics. During the study, aeroelasticity and fluid-structure interaction in particular drew my attention. Secondly one of my life goals is to balance my contribution to the world, in other words, that my work contributes enough to counter the negative environmental effects my presence (currently) has. Enabling renewables to thrive is one way towards this goal. The last reason comes from my passion for kite-surfing and my enthusiasm for flying objects in general. Taking these three aspects into account, it is not surprising that I enjoyed my MSc thesis where I worked on the aeroelasticity of kites used for wind energy extractions. When offered a PhD position, to continue my work, I accepted with much gratitude.

Airborne Wind Energy soft-wing kite design model

In 2020, Jelle Poland graduated from Aerospace Engineering with an MSc in Aerodynamics. The MSc thesis work on developing a fast soft kite wing deformation model forms the base of the PhD research started in July 2022. The funding comes mainly from NEON and partly from Kitepower B.V., an academic spin-off that operates in the emerging Airborne Wind Energy field.

In the PhD the particle-system model developed during the MSc thesis will be extended with an aerodynamic potential flow vortex-step method, experiments shall be done and the model will be applied to improve the performance of soft kites. The overarching goal is to improve the annual energy production of airborne wind energy systems with a focus on Kitepower’s leading-edge inflatable kite system.