Controlled Electric Charging of an Aircraft in Flight using Corona Discharge
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main.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
12.11 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
106a2c0169a4110427daa199ceca374f
Author(s)
Guerra-Garcia, Carmen
Fontanes, Pol
Urbani, Michele
Montanya, Joan
Mouratidis, Theodore
Martinez-Sanchez, Manuel
Nguyen, Cuong
Date Issued
2020
Journal
AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum
Publisher
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
Citation
Guerra-Garcia, Carmen, Fontanes, Pol, Urbani, Michele, Montanya, Joan, Mouratidis, Theodore et al. 2020. "Controlled Electric Charging of an Aircraft in Flight using Corona Discharge." AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum, 1 PartF.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved. This work is part of an ongoing study to provide an artificial means of controlling the net electrical charge of an aircraft in flight through charge emission. The charging system consists on an onboard d.c. high voltage power supply (of the order of 10 kV) with the high voltage terminal connected to a coronating anode and the low voltage terminal connected to the body whose potential needs to be controlled. The system must be electrically floating and exposed to wind. During an initial transient, the positive ions produced by the corona are convected away by the wind and the body charges negatively in response. This paper presents a theoretical model of the charging strategy that reveals two distinct regimes of charging and corona operation, as well as wind tunnel experiments using both a sphere-corona tip assembly and a 2D wing-corona wire assembly that confirm the theoretical predictions. Finally, we implement the system in an RC aircraft to demonstrate that charging in flight using corona discharge is feasible and does not a ect flight operations.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2020-1887
