Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has an enormous role to both military and civilian missions. However, a short range endurance of current UAV system affects the life expediency, data monitoring, and output performance of a mission. This is due to having UAVs that are dependent on batteries. The weight of the battery and low temperature environment has undoubtedly been the main cause for the poor UAV performance. In spite of its prolific improvement in UAV system, the endurance permissible is between 45 minutes to 4 hours. Therefore, this situation makes battery no longer attractive to be widely used for UAV. Lately attention has been focused on the use of solar cell in UAV in replacement to battery as its power system. Nevertheless, current solar cells characteristic and efficiency is insufficient to sustain a long endurance flight. This is due to failure to identify an appropriate selection of material and parts in designing the UAVs solar augmented power module system. Therefore, comprehensive work on the solar power system and its integration is essential for an excellent UAV performance. Thus, a research work has been done to studies on the design of a solar and battery power system for an electric UAV. Subsequently, a small solar powered electric UAV has been developed. As a result, the UAVs specification, layout and systems description are presented extensively in this paper. This UAV has enabled an understanding how the solar augmented system has enhanced the endurance performance the electric UAV to almost 24 hours. Moreover, this UAV has 5 successfully flight up till date with useful data that predicted this UAV aerodynamic characteristic.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    The Development of a Small Solar Powered Electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2013


    Size :

    7 Seiten




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




    The Development of a Small Solar Powered Electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems

    Rajendran, Parvathy ;Smith, Howard | Trans Tech Publications | 2013


    Development of Design Methodology for a Small Solar-Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

    Parvathy Rajendran / Howard Smith | DOAJ | 2018

    Free access

    Unmanned aerial vehicle powered using electric propulsion

    HSU RICKY JUKUEI / NGUYEN JEAN-HUGUES TUAN HUY / CORRAL FRANCO et al. | European Patent Office | 2025

    Free access

    Flight Test Protocol for Electric Powered Small Unmanned Aerial Systems

    McCrink, Matthew H. / Gregory, James | AIAA | 2014


    Preliminary Design of Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

    Jashnani, Sumit / Shaholia, Prahsant / Khamker, Ali et al. | Tema Archive | 2012