Designing and Fly Testing a Long Endurance Solar Unmanned Air Vehicle

The scope of the present work was to design, build and fly test a solar UAV, Sun Falcon 2 for long endurance day and night flight operations. A software program was written to design the UAV with appropriate aerodynamic attributes, power requirements and other flight mission constraints to keep the vehicle airborne for multi day and night operations. More specifically the design called for an least 12 hours of endurance during the day with solar panels deployed to absorb sufficient daylight energy to top up the on board batteries for the complete subsequent night flight mission. With Sun radiation levels averaging at about 6003 W/m2 during the Saudi day it was not too difficult to conform to multi day and night design requirements. The prototype Sun Falcon 2 has already been built and flight tested with satisfactory performance records satisfying the design criteria.