Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Active Output Filter Under Non-Linear Load Conditions

This paper presents a new electric powertrain for solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The proposed system structure is based on the development of the power supply system for both the Solong and Zyphyr aircraft models. The proposed UAV model incorporates the Zyphry UAV use of an AC line feeder instead of DC power lines to power the propellers. The proposed powertrain includes solar panels, an energy management system based on lithium sulfide battery, inverter, AC bus-line and active output filter (AOF). AOF topology is composed of a high switching frequency H-bridge inverter with a reduced size LC filter. The utilization of AOF system reduces the size and weight of the power transmission system and significantly improves its conversion efficiency by introducing an emulated series resistance with the H-bridge stage to ensure high quality pure sinusoidal waveform of the line voltage. This emulated series resistance produces an injected voltage across it to diminish unwanted harmonics created from the non-linear load. A simulation model and experimental setup are created to simulate the proposed system and the system is tested under non-linear load condition with closed-loop feed-back control strategy. The obtained simulation and experimental results demonstrate that high-quality sinusoidal line voltage waveforms can be obtained using the active resistance compensation technique with total harmonic distortion factor less than 3%. Moreover, power losses analysis and conversion efficiency calculation of the proposed system are performed and compared with that of the conventional three-phase PWM inverter, which proved that the power losses are reduced by 31%.