For those following my work, thank you and sorry for the long wait for an update!  I am currently writing up my doctorate so as you can imagine I have been a social hermit recently!

Nevertheless, I have now had a journal paper published which may be of interest to those fellow electronics geeks out there and as a bonus it is open access so no charge to view it!

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319915308065

The paper focuses around balancing a hydrogen fuel cell with a battery with ideal diodes.  These give a tremendous efficiency advantage over traditional diodes.  The powertrain exploits the ability that a fuel cell has to operate at different voltages in order to create a potential long endurance system which still has all the power of a battery at an instant when needed.

Once again, thank you for your interest and I will do my best to answer any questions you have!  The paper is a creative commons license so feel free to use it and build upon it, giving credit for the original work where due!

Undergraduates of Loughborough University have to do a Group Design Project as part of their final year Aeronautical MEng degree. This year, with the help of Simon Howroyd a PhD student at the University, one of the groups were challenged to design and develop a UAV capable of searching for a person, in a Search and Rescue (SAR) mission. The team known as "Overwatch" have heavily modified a Skywalker X8 and used APM2.6 to create a stable camera platform capable of flying search missions.

The project goes beyond the typical hobbyist modelling approach and features heavy theoretical design and analysis including Computational Fluid Dynamics to assess the aerodynamics, backed up by wind tunnel testing. They have also done structural modelling to ensure a stiff structure in unforgiving weather conditions such as storms in mountainous areas which are hard to reach by rescuers en foot.

It is relatively short project, only spanning around 7 months, with all the undergraduates having no prior knowledge of UAVs or RC aircraft, so the learning curve has been steep! Factor this alongside working with unusual materials in this field such as Styrofoam and expanded polyolefin (EPO) and you have a great project to vastly improve the employability of the students in industry after graduation.

May 2014 sees the project come to a conclusion with a presentation and report due. Of particular interest the output of the system is a GPS location and photo of the person to be rescued. This is achieved by utilising a standard search pattern and onboard image processing of camera frames where Matlab code (recompiled as C code and uploaded onto a BeagleBone) makes decisions as to the probability of the subject being found in each frame.

We look forward to any comments you may have and we will post a complete report at the end of the project in a month or so.

UPDATE 11JUN14:  We made the ITV Central, and ITV Yorkshire 6'o'clock news here in the UK!

Pictures:

Find more photos like this on DIY Drones

Videos:

Down facing camera - flight 1

Front facing camera - flight 2

Rear facing camera - flight 3 (with stall & spin)

45deg down facing camera - flight 4

Undergraduate Team:

James Baines - Systems hardware, image processing & prototype development
Sufal Basnyt - Image processing
Oliver Boldero - Prototype manufacture, materials & CAD
Alex Cook - Aerodynamics
Stephen Clarkson - Portability & prototype manufacture
Iain Forbes Brown - Aerodynamics & wind tunnel
Chris Hughes - Comms & swarm logic
Mudasser Iqbal - Prototype manufacture, structural design & catapult
Jitinder Johal - CONOPS, detection, FMECA
Phillip Loughlin - Systems hardware, powertrain & prototype development
Oliver Meager - Aerodynamics & CFD
Thomas Offord - Sense & Avoid
James Whitehead - Comms & swarm logic

Project Directing Staff:

Dr Gary Page - Senior CFD lecturer
Dr Chris Harvey - Structures lecturer
Dr Paul Cunningham - Materials & structures lecturer
Simon Howroyd - Pilot & UAV technical support, PhD researcher

Hi all,

The latest update on my project for the chemical engineering nerds out there, how to get a polarisation curve from my fuel cell using a raspberryPi controller.

Why a fuel cell; if you haven't followed my other posts, they can provide cruise power for hours, greatly increasing the endurance of a RC plane or UAV.

Unlike batteries, fuel cells do not lose voltage with time because you can keep feeding it fuel. Much like a car engine keeps working until the fuel is completely gone, whereas a battery has a gradual reduction in it's output with respect to it's state of charge (SOC). However, the voltage does vary with load, and this relationship is captured in a polarisation curve.

Hope you find the video interesting and inspiring, if so please click LIKE!

Regards,

Simon

Please see the video below for a description of my fuel cell controller (so far) for a remote controlled plane. A fuel cell provides much greater energy density than a battery, so for long endurance it is far superior (hours). Hopefully, with a bit of refinement I'll have the system flying in my SkyWalker X8 in the spring.

 Feel free to comment, I look forward to sparking some interest!

Simon

A hydrogen fuel cell is a device that converts hydrogen gas & air into electricity and water. Although these devices are much lower power density than batteries, they can pump out that power for many hours, depending on the amount of fuel you are storing.

At Loughborough University UK, we are working on a fuel cell and LiPo hybrid, to give you the oompf for take off (and go-arounds!) and the long endurance for cruise and loiter.
The base aircraft is the Skywalker X8, modified to carry considerably more weight than it is designed for (currently 4.5kg all up, and pushing towards 6kg with more testing).
This video briefly explains the platform setup, shows a video using ArduPilot's autonomous take-off, and concludes with a short 4.5kg flight.
In the coming weeks look forward to videos of the payload approaching 6kg, and the fuel cell being connected properly and providing some of the power!