RC Solar Plane Flight Duration Test

Instagram: @danielriley_

[ParaglidingManiac]

Working as an engineer in a experimental solar technology department in Vilnius (Lithuania). I have full access to excess amounts of bifacial monocrystalline cells (152x152mm at 23%efficiency), regular polycrystalline cells (152x152mm at 16%efficiency) as well as solar film. It's efficiency is low at just 12%, but it barely weights anything, is sturdy to mechanical forces and is flexible (you can cover all the surfaces with it). Solar film is something me and my team are working hard on right now, I'd be happy to offer you all the extra we're expeced to have soon during launch of mass production. Have a great day!

[DeSinc]

home surveilance drone, each morning at 9am have it autonomously shoot out and circle your house with a continuously streaming camera feed all day, until night where it lands and waits for morning

[carlost.]

As an aerospace engineer, most of what you said is actually pretty accurate. Reducing your aspect ratio will lead to more induced drag contributing to your drag coefficient, and as you go faster, "skin friction" drag increases with the square of velocity. At low speeds, the induced drag matters a lot because you need a relatively high angle of attack to maintain sufficient lift. As you speed up, your induced drag still exists, but the skin friction drag matters more because it is related to the square of velocity (a third component you did not mention was pressure drag, which also increases with the square of velocity, but since you have a pretty small cross-sectional area going into the wind, it should only be a small component of the drag). I think if you added some winglets, you could bring the induced drag you have down considerably and get a much more efficient plane. But sill, a very cool plane anyways. I'd love to see what else you make.

[fridaycaliforniaa]

Each time I watch your videos, I remember when I was a young teen in the late 90's early 2000's, I was practicing RC planes piloting as a hobby (I should say as a religion lol). With my friends we were tinkering and building amateur RC planes with scrap and propelled them with small 2-strokes engines, sometimes RC engines, sometimes stolen from strimmers or little chain saws XD. There were no GPS modules, nor there was any sort of gyro stab or even more any fps cam, wifi, or whatever. Flying a RC plane truly was a pain in the butt in those times.

Amazing to see how far we've come from this era, with all the auto pilots, auto-stabilized drones, electronics modules, electric engines and all. This always amazes me.

[IndraKurniawan-vkqb]

14:40 "You'll probably need to be streaming in HD"

Me: How dare you underestimate my neighbor's wifi.

[KonstantinosKnd]

You need to do a long range flight with one of those

[deltajjj]

So proud to see young folks with these amazing projects. The future is in good hands!

[RCwithAdam]

Thanks Daniel. I really love being able to tag along and vicariously have these RC adventures (even though they're probably way more boring while you're filming them!)!

[darshitdesai]

Le* Author " I am no aerospace engineer" 5 mins later.... Discussing plots of every type of drag and AR for wing and structural airframe trade-offs. Classic rctestflight

[domowysurvival]

In the footage from directly above the field you can not only see the solar plane, but also the solar rover and the figure 8 it made in the grass. :D

[ALucaRD]

"This is very dangerous"
@
Kicks swollen battery yelling "blow up already"

[jiheljay]

rctestflight : "I'll be glad if I never have to fly a plane for 9 hours straight ever again, it's not a great use of your time."

MS Flight Simulator player : "I don't get it..."

[MyProjectsTV]

OMG a new solar plane video. YAAAY!!!!

[flakmag]

Brb gonna charge my battery

*flies plane *

[Virtual_Plaza]

Nice video dude, i've been highly impressed by such experiment of yours. Just recently planned to create and mount a solar powered water heating system for my summer shower (for any cloudy days), but for some reason i cannot engineer it. Those projects and channels like your seriously inspires people around the world such like me to learn a lot of new things. Good luck with this cute plane.

[douglasfuqua]

That is SOME KINDA AWSOME!!! Well done, and kudos on the patience and endurance...you AND the plane. I experiment with new solar stuff, also. I'd be interested in the new solar film, mentioned by the OEM in comments. Keep flyin' (and keep yer girders up ...engineering talk). All the best...great vid !!!

[danarrib]

Hey Daniel, you should take a look on an "Active Balancer Board". It's a little and lightweight PCB that you can attach to a battery pack and it'll balance the cells automatically and more efficiently than a regular BMS. The BMS burns the excess of energy from the cells while the active balancer transfers the excess to the other cells.

Also, you should be careful with the BMS because it will actually CUT THE POWER OFF when you overcharge and overdischarge the battery, which is not good when the battery is required to fly. What you need is a switch to disconnect the solar panels manually in the case of MPPT charger is not doing it's job.

Your project is great, keep it up! You can do an "infinite flyer" for sure. That's the next step.

[clorophil]

Genuinely my favorite project on YouTube. Keep it up man, it's super interesting seeing the progress

[dannyweldon]

thanks for the videos Daniel. Always enjoy your ideas and your thought process. So much information and easy to understand and follow.

[deebo]

I just found my new FAVORITE channel! Usually it takes several videos for me to say that but this was enough to hook me!