Electric propulsion unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) attract much attention in aviation industry, with electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft tending to gain ground. The current development of hybrid eVTOL aircraft intended for urban air mobility is facing many technical challenges. Among these challenges rises the optimal sizing of its hybrid power system (HPS). The latter requires an energy management strategy (EMS). In this paper, the adopted management strategy is based on filtering techniques using frequency-separation. The EMS ensures the optimal distribution of the load power requirement between the different sources while considering their limits. In addition, the optimal sizing allows to strengthen the complementarity between sources and to indirectly reduce their mass. In this work, the studied HPS consists of a fuel cell associated with an energy storage system (ESS), composed of lithium polymer batteries (Li-Po) and supercapacitors. The onboard sources are connected in parallel on the power bus through three DC-DC converters. The results of this study are presented and discussed to highlight the relevance of the proposed approach.
Applications of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) are expanding for long-endurance mission such as agricultural inspection, fire prevention and many others. Photovoltaic cells can be added to the wing surface and extend the global endurance of the UAV. This paper builds a model of the whole system and estimates the energy savings that can be achieved for different cell technologies and different types of missions. Furthermore, the impact of airplane movement (roll) on the performance of the maximum power point tracking control algorithm (MPPT) is studied.
In the global context of the electric power grid modernization, storage of electricity is a crucial issue. Nowadays, energy storage systems (ESS) are used more and more in positive energy buildings in conjunction with new Low Voltage Direct Current (LVDC) grids. However, the impact of renewable energy sources (RES) on ESS is not well known. The main objective of this article is to determine a systematic methodology to study energy data from a positive energy building in order to determine the impact on ESS dedicated to be included in smartgrids. The aim is to obtain comparative results in normalized working conditions and determine charge/discharge cycles. Clustering methods were compared to choose the more adapted one to treat the stored data of energy production and consumption during more than three years in our experimental platform in LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse. Each type of cycle will help further study in order to estimate its impact on efficiency and lifetime of ESS and then choose the more adapted element for each application.
Conversion of solar energy to hydrogen has been identified as a viable solution for renewable energy development known as solar fuel. LAAS (Toulouse) and RCAST (Tokyo) laboratories have associated in the framework of the NextPV LIA in order to respond to technological challenges concerning solar fuel studies in order to develop optimal sizing methodologies. A system structure for high efficiency solar to hydrogen energy conversion was developed, comprising multi-junction concentrated photovoltaic solar cells, a distributed DC/DC converter architecture, PEM electrolysis, and a battery storage buffer. Experimental results are obtained through a prototype of the proposed structure.
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