 Performance analysis of solar powered Unmanned Aerial VehicleKarthik Reddy B.S. and Aneesh Poondla Renewable Energy, 2017, vol. 104, issue C, 20-29 Abstract: One of the main problems in micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is endurance or flight time since the general domain aircraft use conventional fuel. Using conventional fuel is a pollutant, have a limited life and costly. So there is a huge demand for using an unlimited non-exhaustible source of energy as a fuel. As solar energy is one of the available renewable energy, it can be used to increase the endurance of UAV without adding significant mass nor by increasing the size of the fuel system. By considering the basic challenges for a solar powered aircraft which are a geographical area of operation, energy collection and storage, payload and design parameters, a plane was designed & fabricated by incorporating the solar cells onto the wing. Here at first how much energy is available from the sun to power the entire plane was conceptually analyzed and then it was verified with experimental results. Finally, the energy and exergy efficiencies were calculated and analyzed, as exergy is an important tool in addressing the influence of utilizing the energy resources on the environment. Keywords: Solar cell; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; Renewable energy; Exergy efficiency; Global solar radiation; Endurance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:104:y:2017:i:c:p:20-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2016.12.008 Access Statistics for this article Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.