Advanced hybrid energy harvesting systems for unmanned ariel vehicles (UAVs)

Abstract

The recent use of rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained significant interest and continuously been implemented since they are used across the world for civilian, commercial, as well as military applications. The drawback of UAVs is the fight-time due to the limited battery capacity. Therefore, energy harvesting (EH), captured energy from the ambient environment is one of the effective measures to prolong the flight time for UAVs. This paper proposes the hybrid EH system, which can simultaneously harvest power from solar and radio frequency (RF) energy sources to significantly improve the energy issues for endurance longer flight UAVs. A 7-stage voltage multiplier circuit of the stand-alone RF-EH system is designed and simulated in this work. The stand-alone solar harvester is a solar panel. The DC output voltage from both of two energy sources is passed through a DC-DC boost converter and stabilizer. Simulation results can be deployed to power for the battery of UAVs in practice.