Solar energy is one of the most influential energy resources in the world. It is clean and renewable and can be obtained directly from the sun. Solar power has become a major energy resource that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. So, many government and privately-funded projects and research are being carried out to find new ways to spend solar energy usefully.
Drones:
before we go further in our topic, we need to understand about drones. basically, drones are unmanned Aerial systems or vehicles. There are two types of drones; fixed wing and multirotor. The following figures show the examples for each type.
There are several use cases for these aerial vehicles. They are being used for many human activities such as military, videography/photography, rescue missions, delivery, logistics, medical emergencies etc. So, they are essential devices in the modern and future world.
Solar drone prototype:
one of the biggest problems for modern drone operations is sustainable power/energy supply. Most drones can pass no longer than 15 hours of flight duration without recharging. This makes modern drones weaker in longer-range flights.
So, the best way to overcome this is to recharge the drones while airborne. But we all know that it is very hard to recharge an object while moving, specially if it is in the air.
But one thing we can do is use the energy from sunlight and transform it into electric energy and recharge the batteries. That is how we came up with the idea to create the solar drone. The solar drone is a fixed unmanned aerial vehicle that have the ability to recharge while airborne by converting the solar energy into electrical energy.
Fixed-wing aircraft have la longer flight duration. so, it is better that we use the fixed-wing UAV design.
As shown in the previous figure, the prototype is a fixed-wing drone. Most of the drone’s total space is covered by the wings. the top of the wings(as shown in the figure) will be covered by small solar cells. So, they can be placed face-to-face with sunlight.
Since this is a prototype version developing with financial/commercial purposes, there won’t be much detail. But there will be a DEMO release soon.