[ANN] KiteModels 0.3.1 released

[Uwe Fechner]

This is a major improvement of the package KiteModels, which now provides two different kite power system models, a one point model and a four point model together with a segmented tether model.

Airborne wind energy is a promising form of renewable energy, beautiful to look at and feasible at locations where normal wind turbines do not work well, for example in the Swiss mountains or at the Japanese coast. I am part of a workgroup of the International Energy Agency to provide reference models for governments, civil society and industry.

Also new is the integration of two solvers and a high level interface with the functions init_sim and next_step.

This is to large parts a port from Python (FreeKiteSim, https://bitbucket.org/ufechner/freekitesim ), but with huge advantages due to the use of Julia. The readability of the code improved a lot, as well as the execution speed, which increased by about one order of magnitude compared to Python and Numba.

The Quickstart section of the documentation should make it possible for students to get started in half an hour. The Advanced section explains how to build a system image, using a script included in the package that can be copied to the current project with the command copy_bin().

Examples can be copied with the command copy_examples().

I would be glad if you would try it out and provide some feedback.