Solar-Storm

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Solar Storm is the result of a conceptual design study for a Hybrid-Solar cell powered MAV. And as far as I can search through the internet Solar Storm is the smallest solar MAV (which is autonomous) in the world (please correct me if I am wrong...).

more coming...


Solar Storm


Specifications

  • Span: 500 mm
  • Weight: 300 g
  • Solar cells: 20 cells, serially linked for a maximum theoretical power of 6.5W
  • MPPT: Custom designed Maximum Power Point Tracker

Performances

Solar-Storm has only 2 test flights yet. First to tune :) and second to measure the endurance.

The numbers we got from the first flight test (by using only 730mAH battery) are encouraging:

  • Endurance: 53 minutes
  • Average level-flight consumption: 11-12 W
  • Average power from Solar cells: ~4-5 W

Note: It was a partially cloudy day, sun was hiding behind the clouds for 20 minutes of the flight.

The following plot show power numbers for 7 minutes. From top to bottom, the curves show:

  • (purple) The voltage (V) of the solar cells array
  • (orange) The power (W) of the solar cells array extracetd through the MPPT.
  • (green) The total current (I) consumed by the whole system
  • (blue) The current (I) going out of the battery.

We can observe on the last curve that the battery was sometimes charged in flight !

Solar Plot

Solar-Storm will be capable of flying more than 145 minutes at its designed conditions. But not tested yet :)