One Step Closer to Reducing Emissions with the Help of a Northeastern Co-op
A rendering of CargoKite’s system. Courtesy of CargoKite
Cameron Little, E’26, mechanical engineering, completed a co-op at CargoKite last year. He worked with the company with creating wind-powered container ships that uses large kites to propel them over the water, with his main role being to collect data during testing,
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras.
Wind powered cargo ships are getting real with this co-op’s help
Imagine a massive, bright orange kite hovering several hundred feet above the ocean. Now imagine it is also tethered to a container ship and that the kite is propelling the cargo carrier forward.
Hard as it may be to imagine, harnessing the power of wind to fuel giant ships may be the future of shipping logistics, according to Northeastern mechanical engineering student Cameron Little.
Last year, Little was a mechanical engineer co-op for CargoKite, a Munich, Germany-based maritime startup. Founded in 2022, CargoKite is working on building crewless and wind-powered ships of the future, with the ultimate goal of offering more environmentally-friendly ways to transport goods around the world.
With the capacity to hover 100 to 300 meters in the air, the company’s kites will look and function like the ones used for paragliding or kitesurfing, but at a much bigger scale to harness the ocean’s harsh winds and to adequately propel the company’s “micro ships.”
“Long story short, they’re working to put a really big kite on a cargo ship to reduce fuel emissions,” said Little, a fifth year mechanical engineering student graduating this May.
Little wore many hats during his six months at the company.
One of the biggest technical projects he worked on was collecting data on the kite’s flight pattern during testing, which was done on windy days.
Little and his colleagues would test the kite for at least ten hours at a time capturing data from a GPS and inertial measurement unit – a device used to track motion — installed on it.
That modeling data was key for Little as he helped the company move over to Python, a general purpose programming language that the company plans to use as it enters the next state of development.
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Read full story at Northeastern Global News