Multifunctional Piezoelectric System for a Mini UAV

Abstract

Extending the Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) flight time with clean energy is a new challenge. One of the pioneering technology in this filed is piezoelectric but duo to low power that can be harvested from the piezoelectric material this technology is rare. This project proposes a computational frame work to predict the maximum power that can be harvested from a piezoelectric material implanted in a UAV wing by activating the resonance mode on the piezoelectric harvester. The suitable wing selection controlled by many criteria (aspect ratio, cruse speed, physical characteristic, aerofoil shape, and availability). An equivalent wend tunnel MATLAB code was used to calculate the pressure distribution on the wing. The ANSYS structure analysis was done to b ensure that the structure has enough strength. Then the ANSYS model analysis was done to avoid resonant vibrations on wing. After that the Flutter speed was calculated then the suitable charging speed was calculated. Then the piezo - material shape, type, resonance frequency range was selected, the COMSOLE simulation for the piezoelectric material was done. The proposed frame work output was validated experimentally using a car top rig testing method. The predicted results showed good agreement to the experimental one, the output voltage reached 3.7W with power of 0.734W. Power management circuit was designed to convert the stored piezoelectric power to 5V which was then used to operate the servomotor that is used to control the UAV wing motion in comparison to previous studies that relied on iterative method, the proposed frame work output showed an improvement of (52%) which is expected to better enhance the flight endurance of UAV.