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  4. A Lightweight Device for Energy Harvesting from Power Lines with a Fixed-Wing UAV
 
conference paper

A Lightweight Device for Energy Harvesting from Power Lines with a Fixed-Wing UAV

Stewart, William John  
•
Floreano, Dario  
•
Ebeid, Emad
June 22, 2022
Proceedings of 2022 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)
International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS 2022)

Modern UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) suffer from restrictions in flight range and time due to battery capacity limitations. One way to overcome these limitations is to harvest energy from overhead power lines. A growing body of scientific literature has documented the development of energy harvesters on multirotor UAVs. However, to date, there have been no implementations on a fixed-wing UAV. In this paper we build upon a previously developed passive perching mechanism for fixed-wing UAVs by incorporating into it a split-core transformer for energy harvesting. We validate the perching mechanism as well as battery recharging in a realistic outdoor environment. We find that a minimum speed of 1.25m/s is required to successfully perch on the power line. This is below the stall speed of the UAV used in this project. Furthermore, experiments verified that no damage was done to the power line during perching, as the induced forces were equivalent to 1m/s wind gusts. Characterization of the energy harvesting shows that with a maximum of 3.3W of power from the harvester, we can fully charge a 2200mAh battery in 2.2 hours. Weighing only 420g, our device is the lightest energy harvester developed to date.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/ICUAS54217.2022.9836070
Author(s)
Stewart, William John  
Floreano, Dario  
Ebeid, Emad
Date Issued

2022-06-22

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
Proceedings of 2022 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)
Total of pages

8

Start page

86

End page

93

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS 2022)

Dubrovnik, Croatia

June 21-24, 2022

Available on Infoscience
June 27, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/188767
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