ASSESSMENT OF THE PURPOSEFULNESS OF APPLYING FLEXIBLE SOLAR MODULES FOR LARGE COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT

Abstract

Today we live in a diminishing world due to effective ways of transport, especially aviation. One of the most recent and important issues of our life and scientific research has become the negative climate change – partially due to aviation emission. The “More Electrical Aircraft” has been a term recently created. The ideology of this concept is to power onboard aircraft devices by electrical energy as much as possible. Applying new kind of electrical onboard energy sources (excluding these coming from traditional engines), there is a potential possibility to reduce fuel consumption. Such new electrical energy sources need to respond to some criteria, the most important one of which is that the energy density of the new electrical energy source must be as close as possible, or even greater than the energy density of the traditional fuel aircraft, taking into consideration the efficiency of traditional onboard energy generators. The achievement of this criterion makes the applicability of these new electrical energy sources justifiable. Covering the upper part of the aircraft fuselage oriented to solar radiations by flexible photovoltaic modules creates the possibility to obtain a new onboard electrical energy source. The new energy source is characterised by the fact that its energy production depends on the solar exposition time. Taking into account mass of the photovoltaic installation (in this study for B787) and power generated by these modules, the interrupted flight time needed to achieve the energy density criterion, explained above, has been estimated. Taking into account the current technological possibilities and strongly optimised flight conditions, this time is about 29 hours. Commercial aircraft do not exhibit such long flight duration, which makes the application of accessible flexible photovoltaic modules to passenger aircraft unsuitable.