Design of power supply system for off-grid drone charging station

Abstract

In the past decade, a new technology has born that is currently on the way to revolutionize the transport industry of the 21st century. Drone industry has shown an extreme growth in the past years and it is expected to increase even more in the following years. As the market is increasing, the demand and the requirements are growing too, which means the industry needs to provide the customers market-ready all-round solutions for any kind of applications. Since the drone technology is reaching its mature phase, a well-designed drone logistics technology (drone docking and charging station, control station, etc..) would be needed to offer a full solution to the customer. After analyzing the current drone charging station market, the following conclusion has been made: a few mono-drone charging solutions have already penetrated the market, but due to the limitations of such systems, these solutions do not fulfill the requirements of most of the customers. At the same time, the market of the multidrone charging stations is nearly untouched, only a few prototypes have been shown, which means a significant opportunity for new market entries. This thesis was aimed to introduce the reader to the prototype of the world’s largest multi-drone charging and control station, the V-Station (or Vertical Station), created by EVA Inc. This innovative solution provides 6 separated landing and charging area (each 2.8 m2 ) at 3 different levels, in order to be able to manage any kind of drone fleet for any kind of missions. The reader gets insight into the design phase of the power system of the first prototype of V-Station, starting from the investigations of power supply possibilities, mentioning the preliminary calculations, the design of load profiles, the component selection, the system sizing calculations, the setup of simulations and finishing with the conclusions drawn from the simulation results. Taking into consideration the requirements of the pilot project and the need of customers, the following three power supply concepts have been designed and prepared for the application: On-grid System, Limited Standalone System, Fully Standalone System. After executing various iterations of simulations, the final system configurations have been defined. As a result of this work, the 3 power supply system concepts have been successfully created and prepared for implementation, which allows the company to place VS0001 prototype into operation and this way introduce the world’s largest drone charging station to the market.