Towards Efficiency and Endurance: Energy–Aerodynamic Co-Optimization for Solar-Powered Micro Air Vehicles

Despite decades of development, micro air vehicles (MAVs) still face challenges related to endurance. While solar power has been successfully implemented in larger aircraft as a clean and renewable source of energy, its adaptation to MAVs presents unique challenges due to payload constraints and complex surface geometries. To address this, this work proposes an automated algorithm for optimal solar panel arrangement on complex upper surfaces of the MAV. In addition to that, the aerodynamic performance is evaluated through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations based on the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) method. A multi-objective optimization approach simultaneously considers photovoltaic energy generation and aerodynamic efficiency. Wind tunnel validation and stability analysis of flight dynamics confirm the advantages of our optimized design. To our knowledge, this represents the first systematic framework for the energy–aerodynamic co-optimization of solar-powered MAVs (SMAVs). Flight tests of a (Formula presented.) -span tailless prototype demonstrate the practical feasibility of our approach with maximum solar cell deployment.