Thermal Management Concept Evaluation for a High-Altitude Solar Platform

High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft operate under adverse thermal conditions, with air temperatures very low and at the same time high amounts of heat introduced by sun radiation. Thus, thermal management of the aircraft systems, such as electronics and battery is a very challenging task. A first step in solving this is generating accurate models of the thermal dynamics of the HALE. This paper presents the thermal analysis of a solar-electric stratospheric HALE. For such an analysis, a thermal mathematical model based on first principles was developed. In a further step, an initial test campaign was performed. The test campaign included static and dynamic temperature measurements on a segment of the aircraft's wing structure. The experiments throughout this test campaign showed good compliance of the results with the previously derived mathematical models, with differences of less than 5◦C between the measured and simulated temperature curves