Trajectory Optimization for Continuous Solar Flight

Ashwin Balakrishna

In this paper, I describe the process and results of my study on the flight trajectory optimization of a continuously flying solar aircraft. Continuous flight is achieved by cyclic operation, where the trajectory is repeated indefinitely, typically every 24 hours. The word continuously is used in the theoretical sense, as continuous or perpetual flight is not achievable in practice due to degradation of batteries and aircraft components over time. The importance of flight trajectory optimization has been recognized in both general aviation and space applications. The prevalent class of algorithms for solving these problems are largely sequential in nature, where the differential equations that describe flight motion are solved in an inner loop while an outer loop performs the optimization of the control variables. These methods can be computationally expensive as they require repeated solution of the differential equations for each guess of the control variable in addition to calculation of gradients for the optimizer … In this research, I built upon a simultaneous solution method called orthogonal collocation on finite elements to develop a robust trajectory optimization system with an effective initialization strategy …