Alta-Native Ways to Power UAVs

 

by Molly Hornby

The negative connotation of Drones is slowly being lifted as developments of the devices for commercial and recreational uses are ever increasing. Once a device solely associated with the Military, drones are being widely used and developed within a number of sectors, and with this increasing popularity the importance of long-lasting battery life becomes a fundamental factor.

Although swapping the batteries or using rechargeable batteries are somewhat simple solutions, they can be both expensive and time consuming. A company that is currently working on another viable option for maintaining and improving battery life is Alta Devices, a seven year old company based in California, USA, who started off with the goal of creating the world’s best solar material period. The company has designed a solar panel technology known as AnyLight Technology, which uses solar cells to charge the batteries of devices. Alta Devices has been looking at integrating this into UAVs, as AnyLight can easily be adapted to fit any curved or narrow surfaces and can charge the batteries in the aircraft whilst in flight.

Rich Kapusta, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Alta Devices said, “Our focus today is really to go after markets where there’s either a size constraint or a weight constraint and in some cases both, so in the UAV world it’s kind of a perfect match because you’re really trying to optimize power to weight ratio”.

The company created AnyLight Technology using Gallium Arsenide, a material that has been used in the satellite world for a long time, known for its great performance characteristics. However, Gallium Arsenide is an expensive material to work with, so Alta Devices goal was to figure out a way to make it cheaper so that it can be widely used for a number of applications. Kapusta said, “We did that essentially by making it really thin, so the goal was to use as little raw material as possible and still retain all of those fantastic performance characteristics that you get from Gallium Arsenide. So we basically invented a new manufacturing process. We essentially grow these films on a sub-straight and then they get lifted off and they become these super lightweight and flexible solar cells”. By doing this, the company ended up setting a world record for performance and still remain the current record holders for energy conversion efficiency, with their single junction solar cell conversion efficiency at 28.8%.

An appealing factor of AnyLight technology is that it is of course eco-friendly, using renewable energy to power the batteries. Kapusta said, “Our solar cells will charge whatever battery is in the aircraft, so we’re kind of battery agnostic, so if you want to use lithium iron, great, if you want to use some other technology, great, all we do is provide a way to charge those batteries whilst the aircraft is flying, of course during the day when the sun is shining”. The addition of AnyLight Technology is said to increase flight endurance by more than four times. A proven example of this increase is through Alta Devices partnership with AeroVironment, a company who make a UAV called the Puma. AeroVironment are big within the military market but are now expanding into the commercial market and they recently tested their device with integrated AnyLight Technology. The usual flight time for the Puma is roughly two to three hours, whereas with the attached AnyLight technology, Puma had over nine hours of flight time.

Of course there is one hindrance to AnyLight Technology, in that it relies on access to some amount of sunlight to work. Therefore, in countries where the better weather is guaranteed or during seasons when daylight hours are longer, Alta Devices would be extremely beneficial for Drone users within a number of different sectors, such as Agriculture, land surveying, filming, search and rescue and many more. Kapusta said, “If you can make them fly for 6 or 8 or 9 or 10 hours, it changes the way people think about the utility of these things. You can literally launch it in the morning and collect it at night and have it do its thing all day long, and that’s really really attractive to a lot of different markets within the UAV space”.

Currently, AnyLight Technology is more beneficial to a Fix-Wing Aircraft because these UAVs have a larger surface area for the technology to be integrated into, however there are people working on adapting it so it can be used on Multi-Rotor UAVs as well. With the integration of solar panel technology into UAVs a resounding success thus far, it seems that the demand for solar panel technology for UAVs will only increase, especially as the FAA, CAA and other countries lift their restrictions of the devices. As Kapusta said, “There’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to put solar energy onto every UAV that’s out there, as long as it’s not only used at night. It only gives you more endurance so why not put it on everything”.

Is it possible that there could also be other viable ways to power UAVs in the future, and potentially even have them powered solely from renewable energy sources? Find out more at Sky Tech Event 2015, a UAV Conference & Exhibition at the Business Design Centre, London, 24th April, looking into the future applications of UAVs and the integration of the devices into the Commercial Sector.