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Dynamic Soaring is a flying technique which extracts energy from an environment where wind gradients form, with the potential to increase the endurance of small unmanned vehicles. The feasibility to use dynamic soaring flight is questioned here; it requires the identification of energy-extraction mechanisms as well as accurate understanding of the way energy-harvesting performances are governed by trajectory constraints, vehicle characteristics and environment conditions. A three-dimensional energy-neutral trajectory is derived out of a specified optimization problem. Characteristic phases of flight are evidenced out of an overall closed trajectory. Simplified equations are used to evidence the physics behind energy transfers. Finally, overall energy-harvesting balance is studied through local variations of total energy along the path.

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Dynamic soaring is a flying technique which extracts energy from an environment where wind gradients form, such as the air-sea interface above oceans that sees such gradients developing through multiple and combined phenomena. Models of wind-wave interactions are analysed in terms of their influence on the induced wind field, before selecting a purely sinusoidal peak wave from the wave spectrum and developing the related wind field using stable laminar theory. Dynamic soaring trajectories are then derived by optimising a nonlinear constrained problem that models the evolution of a point mass vehicle. Characteristic phases of dynamic soaring flight are evidenced out of the overall trajectories and compared to the flat-ocean case in order to conclude on the influence of waves regarding dynamic soaring performances.