A model for solar powered aircraft preliminary design

Solar powered aircraft are becoming more and more interesting for future long endurance missions at high altitudes, because they could provide Earth monitoring, telecommunications, etc. without any atmospheric pollution and, hopefully in the near future, with competitive costs compared with satellites. The research activities carried out till now have been mainly focused on flying wings or conventional aircraft configurations, with a great emphasis on the technological aspects. The present paper aims to define a mathematical model for solar powered aircraft preliminary design, valid independently of the aerodynamic configuration. A preliminary analysis is carried out in order to simulate Helios and the results are compared with those available from the flights of this aircraft. The proposed mathematical model is used also to compare four different aircraft configurations, namely: a flying wing, a conventional aircraft, a twin boom aircraft and a biplane aircraft. The results obtained are discussed in the paper and an optimum aircraft is analysed.