Periodic Optimal Control for Solar Aircraft with Unlimited Endurance Capability

Reviews of methods to extract and store energy for solar-powered aircraft

“…Besides, there are also several other methods in consideration, such as to extract energy from wind shear [59][60][61][62][63] and store energy by gravitational potential [64][65][66][67] for solar-powered aircrafts. Although lots of works have been done, it is still not a simple task for the designers of solarpowered aircraft to select a particular technique from a number of existing techniques, since each technique has certain advantages and disadvantages with respect to different performance indices to fulfill the special requirements.…”

Periodic Energy-Optimal Path Planning for Solar-Powered Aircraft

“…46-47. The unlimited flight endurance of a manned, solar aircraft is proposed in Ref. 48, where the aircraft dynamics, energy management, and propulsion systems are considered in a periodic day-night cycle. However, the study of energy-optimal path planning for solar UAVs has not considered the effects of periodic altitude varying flight maneuvers.…”

Descriptive analysis of viability of fuel saving in commercial aircraft through the application of photovoltaic cells

“…Nevertheless the methodologies, models and studies available in the literature were focused on unmanned and experimental aircrafts [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Other projects deal with "High Altitude Long Endurance" (HALE) UAVs [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. In recent years there have been done developments on airships, with the resurgence of these vehicles as a viable alternative of multipurpose platforms [35,36].…”

“…Chen and Bernal [44] have analyzed 200 airfoils and characterized the best four options studied. On the other hand, in [32][33][34] the flight paths optimization for unlimited duration flights (HALE) are studied.…”