Aerostat Winches
Tether management for aerial vehicles like aerostats, helikites, and balloons is unique compared to more traditional applications like towing marine instruments. The aerial vehicle supports the weight of the tether, while the winch needs to be strong enough to recover against the wind load drag forces on the tether and the aerial vehicle.
With basic vehicle lift and drag information from clients, A.G.O. can model the loads for an aerial vehicle application and configure a strong, capable winch to suit. Many aerial vehicle applications require winches with specialty features – A.G.O. meets these needs with custom winches built off of our standard designs as a common starting point to reduce development time and costs compared to a totally custom from-scratch winch design.
Aerostat Winches for Defense
Our core winch design values make A.G.O. winches ideal for aerostat applications in defense contexts where a winch will likely be operated by non-expert field crews in challenging situations.
- Our standard practice of modeling application loads when configuring winch drivetrains ensures that winches are built to handle the expected application loads while providing the line speeds needed for timely recovery.
- Our manual backup redundancy drivetrains included on all manned winches ensure crews still have a way to bring down a vehicle even if the electrical power system or a generator have problems.
- Our straightforward operation controls are intuitive to use, and our electrical systems built around common industry-standard parts with our “Keep It Simple” design approach reduce technical knowledge threshold for troubleshooting operations.
Application spotlight:
LAR/SKA Aerostat Telescope Winches
A.G.O. supplied a set of custom winches used to control the aerostat-positioning tethers in the Large Adapative Reflector radio telescope prototype project, as well as a standard winch specifically for deploying the aerostat from its transport trailer.
For this project, A.G.O. worked together with the LAR/SKA winches to split the scope on the position-control winches: A.G.O. supplied the mechanical winches, and the LAR/SKA researchers developed the control system to automatically coordinate the winches and maintain the aerostat’s position. Splitting the scope like this helped the researchers save costs on the winch aspect of the project.
