Effects of solar array on the thermal performance of stratospheric airship

The harsh stratosphere environment has brought great risks when stratospheric airship is under the long endurance flight, such as supercool and superheat phenomena in the thermal performance. As the critical power source during flight, the existence of solar array deteriorates the thermal performance of stratospheric airship, but the research on the thermal effects of solar array is rare. In this paper, a simplified thermal model of stratospheric airship with solar array including direct solar radiation, infrared radiation, reflected radiation, scattered radiation and convection heat transfer was presented. On this basis, the user define function (UDF) program was developed to investigate the thermal effects of solar array on stratospheric airship using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software. A ground experiment was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical model. Then the temperature distributions of stratospheric airship with solar array, as well as the velocity distributions were analyzed in detail. The simulation results showed that the solar array had a great influence on the thermal performance of stratospheric airship. The theoretical model developed in this paper suggests a pathway towards developing the thermal control technologies of stratospheric airship.