An experimental study on the flight time of quadcopter using solar energy

Abstract The unmanned aerial vehicles are getting popular day by day owing to its ability to hover, low cost of maintenance, ease of deployment as well as high mobility. A quadcopter has limited mobility and payload, but they are highly capable to fly in any direction and to stay stationary in the air. Therefore, the battery lifetime is an important aspect to study which help to travel for a long distance and to increase the flight time. In this direction, the present work focuses on the flight time, which is being analyzed experimentally through the integration of solar panels in the quadcopter for utilization of solar energy as a power source along with the conventional DC battery and by efficient weight reduction of the quadcopter. The proposed quadcopter has been designed in SolidWorks© software and analyzed in Ansys© software as well as it has been fabricated successfully to test for flight time.