Power Management Strategy by Enhancing the Mission Profile Configuration of Solar-Powered Aircraft

Abstract

Solar energy offers solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) the possibility of unlimited endurance. Some researchers have developed techniques to achieve perpetual flight by maximizing the power from the sun and by flying in accordance with its azimuth angles. However, flying in a path that follows the sun consumes more energy to sustain level flight. This study optimizes the overall power ratio by adopting the mission profile configuration of optimal solar energy exploitation. Extensive simulation is conducted to optimize and restructure the mission profile phases of UAV and to determine the optimal phase definition of the start, ascent, and descent periods, thereby maximizing the energy from the sun. In addition, a vertical cylindrical flight trajectory instead of maximizing the solar inclination angle has been adopted. This approach improves the net power ratio by 30.84% compared with other techniques. As a result, the battery weight may be massively reduced by 75.23%. In conclusion, the proposed mission profile configuration with the optimal power ratio of the trajectory of the path planning effectively prolongs UAV operation.

UAV assistance paradigm: State-of-the-art in applications and challenges

“…At the physical layer, the energy could be saved by optimizing several hardware aspects, such as access to physical medium, power control for the network hardware devices, modulation and demodulation, and encoding-decoding. Moreover, creating new hardware devices that are able of modifying the wireless network, according to the varying traffic demands, shadowing, undefined direction of communication, varying radiation patterns, and interference [78], [79].…”

Implementing Solar-Powered HAPS for Rural broadband Connectivity: Concepts, Challenges & Mitigation

“…In this design a hybrid electric aerial vehicle using photovoltaic, fuel cell and battery was considered and does not fit the operational framework of the strictly solar aircraft under consideration. The optimisation and restructuring of the mission profile configuration was proposed by Rajendran et al [11]. This approach emphasises the need to follow optimal paths that will maximise the energy from the sun, however, this method did not consider any specific use case.…”

“…has to be considered as well. Amorosi et al [11], proposed a method where the energy consumption for a rural cellular network could be managed by using a combination of UAV and terrestrial networks powered by solar panels and batteries to balance the energy requirements. The technique is based on the design where high level tasks like baseband processing and handovers are carried out by terrestrial base stations while low level functions are carried out by hardware hosted on the UAV.…”

Fuzzy State Machine Energy Management Strategy for Hybrid Electric UAVs with PV/Fuel Cell/Battery Power System

“…For the full electric UAVs with different types of power sources, most researchers only considered two types of power sources, such as a fuel cell and a battery (FC + B) [32][33][34][35][36][37] or photovoltaics and a battery (PV + B) [38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Very few of researchers concentrated on the hybrid PV/fuel cell/battery (PV + FC + B) [25,29,45,46] power system as they are more complicated.…”