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Solar Powered UAV to Set Aviation Endurance Record?
Iddo Genuth writes to mention that a group of Israeli students is hoping their latest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will soon break the world aviation record for endurance that has stood for over 17 years. The piece features a short history of solar power aviation and an interview with the students.
The work done at the Technion as well as elsewhere around the world is starting to attract the attention of the aviation industry with the hope of creating green aircrafts with a much higher endurance threshold.
I dont really see this being applied to commercial passenger or cargo planes. Maybe ultralites.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
For a small solar radio controlled flight:
That's a long way for a small aircraft, but a full-sized one would be more exciting.... (and I bet it'd go further).
The website is already suspended. Another notch in the Slashdot gun.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"... could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or if transported, to other countries, including the United States."
-- Secretary of State Colin Powell in a presentation before the U.N. Security Council, February 5, 2003
Oh, snap! These are just students trying to set a new endurance record. The purity and essence of our natural... fluids are not at risk. Surely we must issue the recall code immediately.
This is why solar powered flight is important:
e red_p_2.php
"Called the Zephyr, it's an aircraft that can fly continuously using nothing but solar power and "low drag aerodynamics". The combination of solar panels on the upper wing surface and rechargeable batteries allows Zephyr to be flown for many weeks and even months. The first flight trial of the Zephyr were conducted recently by QinetiQ in White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
Two aircraft were flown for four and a half and six hours respectively, the maximum flight times permitted under range restrictions. The maximum altitude attained was 27,000 feet above sea level. The ultra-light aircraft is designed to fly at altitudes as high as 132,000 feet (25 miles/40km), above normal commercial air-lanes and most weather.
QinetiQ believes that stratospheric platforms will rapidly become commercially viable and revolutionize future communications. High altitude platforms of this sort could provide a cheaper alternative to satellites in remote areas and developing countries. They can also enable observation of natural disasters and humanitarian crises."
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/03/solar_pow
Health Insurance Quotes
"ground braking"
Obviously the return and land part of the project needs work.It will be first tested to guide Israeli bulldozers against Palestinian olive groves.
On the other hand, Colin is assuredly correct. In fact, if you built enough of them you wouldn't even need to transport them to get them close. That's part of the allure of solar power. You'd probably lose some due to weather, of course. You actually used to be able to order an R/C predator with GPS, digital camera, and waypoint support, but I can't find it now. It was based on the US Military's Predator UAV.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A team has already crossed the Atlantic using a small radio model plane. The one from the story is really much of a threat but yes it could be possible. I am not going to loose a lot of sleep over it right now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The world record is a unmanned plane that flew for 17 years??? Good luck breaking this one. André
mirror
I was reading a book about some early aviation firsts, and they had a story about two brothers who set an early record of something like 36 hours aloft. They refuelled by having a truck with jerrycans of gas drive along the runway, while one brother was out on the landing gear grabbing them off the truck and heaving them into the plane. THEN he got to pour them into the tank, which was located in front of the windshield. Even better, was relashing the valve clearances *while the engine was running*. (Which isn't as unusual as it sounds: the early Ford 427 engines also had valve adjustment done with the engine idling, which SUCKED, lemme tell you what.)
So, using a UAV sounds like a vastly safer and more pleasant experience.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Aerovironment Pathfinder ... which developed into NASA's Centurion. Don't know how this israeli thing looks (something about cpu quota exceeded), but I think Aerovironment's flying wing was/is the right way to go.
I'm trying to book an overnight flight on this thing, but I'm not seeing any on the schedule. Oh, wait ...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A company called AC Propulsion has already made a solar powered plane that has flown for longer than two days. The plane uses regular solar cells and batteries, using the solar cells to charge the batteries so that it can fly on the stored power during the night.
During the day, the plane used thermals to try to maintain altitude on as little power as possible. Thermals are, of course, derived from solar power as well.
As battery and solar cell technology continues to improve, this challenge has gone from being impossible to hard to doable, and it will soon become easy.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
A hydrogen-filled blimp with docks for solar-powered planes could allow me to reign over those fools on the surface almost indefinitely!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
A modern "Western" society (including Israel) is too advanced socially and culturally to deal with the inconvenient people the old-fashioned way — through massive killings, destruction, and/or religious conversions (the latter being the mildest form).
While undoubtedly a good thing, this inability is seen by some as dangerous (sometimes even fatal) weakness — the underdeveloped enemy usually has no such self-imposed limitations.
This article, however, reminds of the flip-side of the advanced society — the mind-boggling speed of technological and scientific progress, which will allow us to prevail without the above-mentioned ugliness. Israel, for example, will not need to "pull a Darfur", where hundreds of thousands of people were killed and raped, and millions driven out from their homes by the Arabs hordes unleashed by the government to suppress some insurrection or another...
Instead, Israel will be able to use these machines to target the real enemies, keeping the innocents alive, even if enraged.
Progress in weapons is a good thing — better weapons kill fewer people.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Considering the extra surface area, I wonder if solar power could help out this ship: http://www.aeroscraft.com/Index.html.s -selling-solar.html
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Solar power: the past present and future: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
This is somehow a better solution than filling a bag with helium? Or even, simply painting a bag black
http://perso.orange.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.htm
Deleted
If you can make a UAV that climbs to ~100000 feet in the day and glides down slowly enough that it's still above ~50000 feet at dawn, then you'll avoid all weather (including clouds) except on takeoff and landing. I could see something like that staying up for months or years at a time.
Solar's niche is high altitude, slow speed and long endurance. It will have some neat uses, but there's not enough oomph for high speed or high payload applications like jetting to Vegas for the weekend.
Maybe a leisurely aircruise to Vegas then. Just imagine all that surface area on a Zeppelin!Set your phasers on "funky"!
Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Technion Israel Institute of Technology is an ultra-religious university. I think it is one of the only religous universities which does so much. It is the home of Dr. Shulamit Levenberg a Charedi (ultra-orthodox) scientist whom Scientific America list in the top 50 leading scientists.
I say it is about time someone makes a wikipedia article for her.
Technion Israel Institute of Technology is a regular Israeli university with a mix of students, religious, non-religious, Jews, Arabs and others - just like all the others.
Just because you find one haredi (ultra religious) woman on the staff, doesn't mean anything. The only Israeli university with a specific religious agenda is Bar Ilan, near Tel Aviv and even then it's not ultra-religious.
If you like Shulamit Levenberg, then I suggest you make a Wikipedia article for her, that's the idea of Wikipedia...
29 mpg. YMMV.
The "problem" with these "solar powered" drone is that in fact to do most useful things (like being a cellphone base station), they need to have another power source, so these drones are hybrid.
I guess that if you have 90% of your energy coming from a fuel cell and 10% for solar cell, you're 'solar powered', but these 'solar powered' planes won't be able to stay forever in the air like a blimp would.
no shitzkah