Although 100% solar-powered airplanes were first demonstrated many years ago, we now present a 100% solar- powered aircraft which can controllably hover high out of the ground effect, and take off and land vertically, with no energy storage device on board. Key engineering challenges associated with solar panel construction will be highlighted; in particular, nine different designs will be described. This achievement of solar-only take-off stably in a rotorcraft, without wings, has been a difficult engineering challenge in aviation, given that the weight and efficiency of current monocrystalline silicon solar cells necessitate a very light frame.
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Goh et al. (2019) studied this question.
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