First Flight of Scaled Electric Solar Powered UAV for Mediterranean Sea Border Surveillance & Forest Fire Monitoring

Topic: Aircraft Design) A research is being carried out (within several EC funded projects) aiming at the design of Very-Long Endurance Solar Powered Autonomous Stratospheric UAV (VESPAS-UAV) and manufacturing of solar powered prototype. It could play the role of a pseudo satellite, with the advantage of allowing a more detailed land vision due to the relative closeness to the land and at cost (of about 10 M€) much less than a real satellite (300 M€). An area of 300km of diameter would be monitored by each one of this platforms. UAVs are less expensive than other manned aircraft used for the borders surveillance drastically reducing service cost and tedious work. An integrated multi-sensor interoperable system based on the use of remote means of surveillance should be used to monitor South European border in order to prevent the admission of terrorists or anti-illegal people (Fig. 1). It should be possible to detect flame length of the order of few square meters, would be much easily to detect illegal fishery, it provides a powerful tool in characterizing the marine environment for habitat monitoring. The full scale HELIPLAT® UAV (Fig. 2) has been designed by using the most advanced tools for obtaining an endurance of several months and being operable in almost all typical environment conditions (wind jet up to 38m/s – 137km/h) at stratospheric altitude (17-20 km) (wing span 73m). During the day it flies by solar power generated by thin high efficiency solar cells that cover the aircraft’s wing and horizontal tail. By night it is powered by a brushless electric motor and fuel cell system fed by gaseous hydrogen and oxygen stored into pressurized tanks. A payload up to 150kg, with available power up to 1500W, could be installed on board for several global monitoring of environmental and security applications (GMES). A scaled size prototype (wing span 24 m , length 7 m) was built in order to show the technological feasibility.