Experiment and evaluation of solar powered UAV by virtual flight system

Recently UAVs are applied in various fields, such as monitoring forest fires, border surveillance and so on. To achieve long-term endurance of UAV is important for various mission purposes. The solar UAV is one way for long-term endurance. The development and test of solar UAV has practical constraints in real flight evaluation because of its limitation of technical infrastructure. In this study, the virtual flight evaluation system is designed for replicating real flight motion of the solar powered UAV to evaluate a flight performance. The virtual flight system evaluates the performance of the main parts, such as solar module, MPPT, battery packs and verifies the feasibility of long-term endurance. The virtual flight system can monitor the energy flow by the measurement of energy production and consumption according to flight motion. And the experimental result was compared with the simulation using MATLAB for validation.