Feasibility Analysis of Hybrid Power System used on Solar-powered Aircraft

Using-only photovoltaic battery on solar-powered aircraft will waste energy because of its low conversion efficiency. For reusing the energy that converted into heat by photovoltaic cells, a hybrid power system is presented in this paper for solar-powered aircraft. It's a new electricity-generating method that spreading photovoltaic cells on the wing surface and arranging photothermal cells in the wing box section. Due to temperature of the back of photovoltaic battery is high, it can be used as high temperature heat source. And the lower wing surface can be a low temperature cooling source. A lightweight solar-powered UAV was used to analyze the relevant performances of pure photovoltaic powered aircraft and hybrid powered aircraft. The result shows that using hybrid system can reduce the area of wing by 4.6%, and solar-powered aircraft with a 6m or below-6m wingspan can raise the utilization rate of solar energy per unit area by adopting hybrid power system.