Hybridisation of fuel cells and batteries for aerial vehicles

Sammanfattning: There is an ever growing need for environmentally sustainable alternatives in today's society due to the looming threat of greenhouse gasses. One field where the need for new environmentally friendly solutions is needed is the aviation industry. The problem the industry is facing is due to the weight and space constraints that exist in aerial vehicles. In this bachelor project a solution for unmanned drones is proposed where it is powered by a hybrid solution consisting of batteries working together with fuel cells. The batteries compliment each other where the fuel cell is a lightweight energy source while the battery is used to combat the changing power demand. This project was done in collaboration with the Green Raven project to evaluate the optimal setup to power the energy system for an hour. The work was done theoretically in Matlab and Simulink to find the optimal system. From these simulations, data was collected to calculate the optimal configuration between batteries and amount of hydrogen stored in the Hydrogen tank. It was concluded that the best option to store the hydrogen was in a 2 liter tank at 300 bar together with 2 additional batteries with the capacity of 4000 mAh. This setup was concluded as the best option as it used up all hydrogen and landed with less charge in the battery than at the start point.