SOARING WITH THE SUN: 4 YEARS OF SOLAR RC PLANES.Many of us have projects that wind up spanning multiple years as well as multiple models and gets revisited every single time inspiration strikes as well as you've forgotten just how much work and stress the previous round was.

It is a gold mine of info gathered through tough experience, covering carbon fiber building techniques, solar energy management as well as the difficulties of screening in the real life, to name a few.Solar Plane V1 had a 9.5 feet/ 2.9 m carbon fiber skeleton wing, covered with a transparent film, with the delicate monocrystaline solar cells installed inside the wing.

V1 experienced numerous accidents which smashed all the solar batteries, up until [Daniel] discovered that the wing flexed under aileron input.

V2 included a 2nd wing spar to a somewhat longer 9.83 ft/ 3 m wing, which allowed for even more solar batteries.Solar Plane V3 was upgraded to use a single hexagonal spar to conserve weight while still keeping stiff, as well as the solar batteries were a lot more long lasting and also reliable.

[ toy airplanes ] did a lot of testing to find an optimal solar billing set up and discovered that using the solar array to bill the batteries straight in a well-balanced system actually works similarly well or much better than an MPPT fee controller.V4 is a separation from the difficult carbon fibre layout and makes use of a straightforward foam board flying wing with a tipped KF airfoil rather.

It did remarkably well, keeping the battery completely charged throughout the whole flight, which however finished in a collision after adjusting the autopilot.