Design and Testing of a Vertical Take-Off and Landing UAV Optimized for Carrying a Hydrogen Fuel Cell with a Pressure Tank

Abstract

Flight endurance is still a bottleneck for many types of unmanned air vehicle (UAV) applications. While battery technology improves over the years, for flights that last an entire day, batteries are still insufficient. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells offer an interesting alternative but pose stringent requirements on the platform. The required cruise power must be sufficiently low and flying with a pressurized tank poses new safety and shape constraints. This paper proposes a hybrid transitioning UAV that is optimized towards carrying a hydrogen tank and fuel cell. Hover is achieved using 12 redundant propellers connected to a dual Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and dual power supply. Forward flight is achieved using a tandem wing configuration. The tandem wing not only minimizes the required wingspan to minimize perturbations from gusts during hover, but it also handles the very large pitch inertia of the inline pressure tank and fuel cell very well. During forward flight, 8 of the 12 propellers are folded while the tip propellers counteract the tip vortexes. The propulsion is tested on a force balance and the selected fuel cell is tested in the lab. Finally, a prototype is built and tested in-flight using battery power. Stable hover, good transitioning properties, and stable forward flight are demonstrated.

A Survey on Swarming With Micro Air Vehicles: Fundamental Challenges and Constraints

“…A different solution is to use combustion engines (Zufferey et al, 2013 ; Nex and Remondino, 2014 ; Ross, 2014 ). They benefit from the high-energy density of fuel and can help to provide long endurance flight, although they are typically applied to larger drones in outdoor environments Alternatively, fuel cells have also been explored as a power source for long endurance flight, with increasingly promising results in the recent years (Gong and Verstraete, 2017 ; De Wagter et al, 2019 ; Pan et al, 2019 ).…”

Optimal Periodic Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Fourier Integral Pseudospectral and Edge-Detection Methods

“…Fortunately, several other approaches exist to extend the endurance and allow for long continuous flights. One approach is to use certain fueled systems, such as liquid hydrogenor hydrocarbon-fueled systems [12,13], although the latter systems generally suffer from fundamental problems pertaining to noise, efficiency, and reliability [14]. Another approach is to use solar cells to power UAVs by harvesting energy from the outside and providing additional power that is dependent on the sun, weight, wing surface area, and efficiency [15][16][17].…”

Testing Study of Different Flow Direction and Structure for Air-Cooled Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

“…PEMFCs boast zero pollution, low operating temperatures, fast response to load change, no limitation by the Carnot cycle, and outstanding energy conversion efficiency [3]. PEMFC continues to gain credibility as an alternative power supply in many applications, including portable power supplies for personal electronic devices, commercial aircraft auxiliary power units (APUs) and even aircraft and orbiting platforms [4][5], and UAV [6][7]. Alkaline Fuel Cells (AFC) and PEMFC have been used as primary power sources for spacecraft since the 1960s, on the Gemini manned spacecraft, the Apollo moon spacecraft and the Space Shuttle, as well as on the Russian Lunar Orbiter and the Space Shuttle Tempest [8][9][10][11].…”