1

INITIAL CONCEPT REPORT

on
HIGH ALTITUDE LONG ENDURANCE AERIAL PLATFORM
(HALEAP)
Submitted by
TEAM VIMANA
RAJALAKSHMI ENGINEERING COLLEGE
JANUARY 2020

MENTOR TEAM MEMBERS

Dr. YOKESH KUMAR SINHA 1. PRAVEEN
HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT 2. VINOTH
AERONAUTICAL DEPARTMENT 3. JOHN DE BRITTO
RAJALAKSHMI ENGINEERING COLLEGE 4. SURENDAR KUMAR
5. PRIYA
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HALEAP MISSION REQUIREMENTS

Operating altitude or the altitude in which it will be deployed 15-20 km above mean sea level.

Maintain its position over a Metro city for around three months
31st Dec midnight to 25th March midnight – Delhi (84days = 2016 hrs)
31 March midnight to 25 June midnight – Kolkata (86days = 2064 hrs)
st th

30th June midnight to 25th Sep midnight – Chennai (86days = 2064 hrs)
30th Sep midnight to 25th Dec midnight – Mumbai (86days = 2064 hrs)

Then relocated to another Metro city within five days (120 hrs),

Longest distance between the cities is between Kolkata and Chennai

Delhi to Kolkata = 1320 km
Kolkata to Chennai = 1380 km
Chennai to Mumbai = 1040 km
The Platform should move at a speed above 11.5 km/hr to relocate to another city within five
days (calculated for Kolkata to Chennai)

Communication payload = 100 kg , which consumes power at a rate of 1000 W.

The system should be able to generate power to maintain station within ground foot print of
5km *5km , and to relocate within five days

Take off and land within 2 km @ ISA sea level

All flight operation are conducted in Indian Reference Atmosphere (IRA), and the variation
in magnitude of ambient wind must be considered while designing HALEAP, using models
such as the Horizontal Wind Model developed by US Naval Research Laboratory in 2008,
and updated in 2015.
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INDEX

S NO CHAPTER PG NO

1. INTRODUCTION 5
2. LITERATURE SURVEY 6
3. SELECTION OF CONFIGURATION 8
3.1. TYPES OF AIRSHIPS 9
3.2. HYBRID AIRSHIPS 10
4. DESIGN DRIVERS 13
5. DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY 15
6. SOFTWARES USED 15
REFERRED
7. LIST OF GUIDANCE TOPICS 15
8. ACTION PLAN 16
9. CONCLUSION 16
10. REFERENCES 17
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ABSTRACT
High Altitude Long Endurance Aerial Platform HALEAP, offers the possibility of
becoming the future of earth observation and telecommunication. They were designed to
operate at an altitude of 15-20 km due to low wind speeds and air density at this altitude .Our
objective is to design a HALEAP for station keeping over four fixed cities for a total period of
almost one year, without the need to land during the mission. In this report we will discuss
about the literature survey that we did on pre-existing high altitude platforms based on mission
requirements, Selecting the configuration that best suits the given problem statement, Finding
the requirements that are going to be the major drivers of the design. We have distributed the
roles and responsibilities among our team members based on their expertise and interest.
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1. INTRODUCTION
The High altitude platform operation around 20 km, is motivated by the facts that in these
altitudes the wind speed is less intense and, as a consequence, the HAP requires less power to
maintain position. High Altitude Long Endurance Aerial Platform are increasingly being
considered to perform a wide range of tasks.These aircraft may be airplanes, airships or
balloons, manned or unmanned. Over the years, several terms have been used for this type of
aircraft, such as: “High Altitude Powered Platform”, “High Altitude Aeronautical Platform”,
“High Altitude Airship”, “Stratospheric Platform”, “Stratospheric Airship” and “Atmospheric
Satellite”. The term “High Altitude Long Endurance” (HALE), which has sometimes been used
to label HAP, is generally more associated with conventional unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs), with service ceiling of about 18 km, as the Global Hawk. Our design has to be able to
operate at 15 -20 km altitude as per the mission requirements. They can act as pseudo satellites,
but with the advantage of being much cheaper and closer to the ground and they can perform
missions that offer greater flexibility. They could be self-launched, easily recovered for
maintenance,whenever necessary, and moved to cover different regions, if desired. They allow
a more detailed land vision, due to their relative closeness to the Earth, at a much lower cost
than conventional satellites. The main advantage of the HALEAP is that this system has less
climbing and descending events, which is important when considering interference with
aviation traffic .HALE configurations which have a very limited endurance, would drastically
increase any potential collision risk with civil aviation traffic. Very high endurance, in fact,
calls for high mission reliability requirements of the air vehicle, its systems and payload.
Regenerative power technologies, such as thin film photovoltaic (PV) arrays, fuel cells,
electrolysers, power, and management systems, are the keys to achieve long-endurance
regenerative UAV. Since the basic power source, the sun, is not available throughout the whole
day, effective designs for managing, collecting, storing, and consuming energy are needed to
make the platform a real alternative to satellites for night and day missions. The design of a
vehicle that is able to operate solely from the incoming energy of the sun is a fine balance
between energy collection and energy consumption. This energy balance is influenced by a
number of factors such as the operational environment and the capabilities and efficiencies of
the power system components.
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2. LITERATURE SURVEY
CURRENT OPERATIONAL OR PLANNED AIRSHIP

BD2

The Blue Devil 2 airship, built by Mav6, is a conventional non-rigid designed to fly at 20
kft for 4 to 5 days with a 2,500 lb ISR payload including onboard processing that makes it an
aerial data fusion node. Originally scheduled for first flight in the fall of 2011, the program was
cancelled in June, 2012 due to technical and programmatic challenges.

MZ-3A

The Navy’s MZ-3A, a modified American Blimp Corporation A-170 commercial airship,
is a 178 ft long non-rigid ISR airship that carries a crew. It is currently the only operational
airship in the DoD and is used for payload test and evaluation. It was used recently to monitor
the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The MZ-3A is a platform for up to 2,500
lb of cameras, radar and other sensors. It flies at up to 9.5 kft and cruises at 40 mph. Its typical
flight duration is 10 hours but it has a 24-hour capability.

LEMV

The LEMV is a non-rigid airship of hybrid design. It was developed for deployment in
Afghanistan in 2012. It can operate at 20 kft for up to 21 days an can produce up to 16 kW of
electrical power and carry a 2,500 lb ISR payload. Schedule delays and weight growth reduced
the altitude to 16 kft and flight duration to 16 days by the time the first flight was performed in
August, 2012. The program was cancelled in February of 2013 and the vehicle was deflated
and sold back to its builder, Hybrid Air

HiSentinel

The HiSentinel program is a family of high altitude airships to provide persistent

communications and ISR capability to the DoD. The HiSentinel program was a tactical airship
demonstration program for the DoD to demonstrate the various key technologies for a
stratospheric airship. The HiSentinel systems were comprised of the airship, ground support
systems, weather support system, and flight/payload command, control and communications
ground station. Six high altitude airship engineering flights have been conducted over the years
with five of those flights achieving greater than 65 kft altitudes. All key stratospheric airship
technologies were demonstrated during the development program.
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HALE-D

The HALE-D is a high altitude conventional non-rigid airship demonstrator for the HAA,
the larger High Altitude Airship. Intended to operate at 60 kft for two to three weeks with a
small demonstration payload, the first flight occurred in July, 2011. Unfortunately a problem
occurred during ascent and the flight was terminated after rising to only 32 kft. The airship
came down in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Pennsylvania. During recovery
operations, the hull caught fire and was destroyed. Funding for the program ended in 2011.

ISIS

The ISIS (Integrated Sensor Is Structure) Demonstration System Program is a conventional

non-rigid airship that includes an integrated Radar system. The airship is 511 feet in length and
operates at an altitude of 65 kft for one year. Originally intended for a first flight beginning in
late 2012, cost and technical challenges have caused the program to delay airframe
development and to refocus on radar risk reduction testing, which will complete in mid-2014.

Star Light 3

The U.S. Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Center awarded a Phase 1 and Phase 2 contract to
begin development of a next generation stratospheric airship with a radically new design. The
vehicle, named StarLight, was proposed to deliver unprecedented performance in operating
altitude, flight duration and forward velocity. The uniquely designed vehicle would supposedly
operate at 85 kft above the earth’s surface powered solely by photovolatics. Current status
appears to be inactive.
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3. SELECTION OF CONFIGURATION
There is no clear rule on whether aerostatic or aerodynamic systems are in general the
preferable solution for stratospheric platforms. Because of their different characteristics and
behaviour, the platform selection very much depends on the, applications and the
corresponding flight envelope. A comparison of the technical reference designs with the
payload requirements from the system architecture showed that the smaller aerodynamic
Configuration would be suitable for the mission requirement (payload of 100 kg and available
power for payload of 1 kW), while the larger aerostatic design (payload greater than 1000 kg
and power of 20 kW) would be required for an operational telecom service scenario).On the
other hand, for a rigorous station-keeping position throughout the year, and the high
windspeeds in the wintertime could be difficult to be contrasted because of the wind sensitivity
of aerostatic platforms.
Figure 3.1 from the book Fundamentals of Aircraft and Airships design Volume 2 by Nicholai
and carichner presents a simplistic view of the relative efficiencies of buoyant vehicles vis-a-
vis high speed winged aircraft. Fig. 3.1 one concludes that for systems where high speed (>
120 kt) is not important and/ or long duration is important, there is no better solution
than a buoyant vehicle. However, this benefit deteriorates rapidly with an increasing need for
speed such that above about 150 kt the winged aircraft will always be a more efficient mode of
transportation.

Fig 3.1
But as per our mission requirements the platform has to relocate between cities within five
days, this will help to determine the minimum speed in which the platform should travel to
relocate between cities within five days. Longest distance between the cities is between Kolkata
and Chennai. The Platform should move at a speed above 11.5 km/hr to relocate to another
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city within five days (120hrs) (calculated for Kolkata to Chennai), which is calculated by
simple distance/time formula. But in real time the platform will need to travel a greater
distance(>1380 km) in order to compensate for the change in ambient wind direction, while
travelling from Kolkata to Chennai, but even in those long routes the speed requirements will
still persist in the low speed range. So we can conclude that Buoyant systems(Airships) would
be the most suitable platform for this mission statement

3.1 TYPES OF AIRSHIPS:

Fig 3.2
Fig 3.2 shows the three types of Airships, Among the three types of conventional airships
Rigid type of airship are best suited. Unlike non-rigid and semi-rigid airships that maintain
their shape by the internal pressure of lifting gases, rigid airships retain their shape from an
internal structural framework on which the aircraft’s outer envelope is connected. With the
internal framework, a rigid airship has the capability of being built much larger than a non-
rigid or semi-rigid dirigible because there is no chance of kinking in the hull due to
aerodynamic forces and moments. Inside the internal framework, the airship is filled with
multiple gas cells holding the lifting gases. Because of the size of most rigid airships, using
multiple gas cells minimizes the chances of a catastrophe in the event that one is compromised.
In order to meet the power requirement for about one year ,we planned to have solar cells
enveloping the airship. A typical rigid airship with its internal structural layout is shown
below in Fig 3.3.
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Fig 3.3
3.2 HYBRID AIRSHIP
Even though buoyant vehicles are very efficient, adding buoyancy does not always result in a
reasonable design and they are difficult to be controlled. As a result, airplane designers,
recognizing that a buoyant lifting gas offers efficiencies far beyond those of winged aircraft,
have many failed attempts to integrate a lifting gas into an airplane. Fig 3.4 Shows some of
the failed attempts. Why is this design road littered with failures? The problem is that most
"would be" designers fail to recognize that adding volume for buoyant lifting gases creates
drag more rapidly than it creates lift until at least 50% of the lift force is generated by
buoyancy.

Fig 3.4
Since mid-1990’s new airship design emerged called Hybrid Airships ,which is a
combination of aerodynamic and aerostatics. They also provided better stability against
ambient winds than conventional airships, Fig 3.5 shows a typical Hybrid Airship.
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Fig 3.5
But Airships are meant to carry heavy payloads since their emergence, but our mission
requirement of 100 kg payload and 1kw power supply (to the payload) and long endurance
operation of nearly one year, forces us to go for buoyant systems. And also specifically
hybrid airships, as they are more controllable than a purely buoyant system. As per the given
mission statement , Our system has to handle heavy ambient winds especially during winter,
and also our platform has the possibility of encountering few tropical cyclones on the coast of
bay of Bengal while relocating from Kolkata to Chennai during the last week of June. During
the months of June and September ,On an average about 5-6 tropical cyclones form in the
Bay of Bengal every year.

Fig 3.6
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Hybrid Airships which can go up to 100 miles/hour can take advantage of the tail winds of
these cyclones and can have a reduction in travel time, this is shown clearly in the Fig 3.6. So
we can conclude that hybrid Airships are the most suitable platform to address this problem.
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4. DESIGN DRIVERS
The preliminary design is of particular importance when the aircraft being sized is expected
to perform functions that have been hitherto unattained by even the most recent of attempts. If
the aircraft being sized was going to perform a more conventional task, than the methodology
to follow is reasonably well defined and documented, and the design drivers are usually more
readily apparent or surface quickly when analysing parametric data.For a High-Altitude Long
Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (HALE UAV) the design drivers are not as readily
apparent. It is necessary to perform a constraint analysis on the aircraft based upon the general
aircraft mission to be performed, for each possible set of mission requirements. This is achieved
by defining what areas of the flight regime will be the most limiting on the overall design. For
this aircraft, the obvious areas of limitation is Cruise. Endurance, and Minimum Rate of Climb/
Maximum Ceiling. An area that is not as obvious is the Maximum Load Factor. Below are the
equations necessary to perform the constraint analysis.

1. Range

Breguet Range:

where d W/dt is the vehicle weight change due to burning fuel. The weight change for
a propeller propulsion system is d W/dt = (BSFC) (hp), where BSFC is the brake
specific fuel consumption of the engine

2. Endurance
The expression for vehicle endurance or loiter is shown in Eq.

where d W/dt is the weight change due to fuel burned.

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3. Drag of the Airship

The airship drag coefficient CD is

4. Power required
Because propulsion systems for airships do not involve jet engines and are only powered by
piston and turboshaft engines driving propellers, thrust terms have little value and only power
terms are used for airship performance. Therefore, the drag determines the thrust required TR
and is written as

A typical plot of the zero lift drag and drag-due-to-lift contributions to power required for CA-
l and HA-l configurations
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5. DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

TEAM MEMBER FIELD OF STUDY

PRAVEEN PERFORMANCE CALCULATION

KUMAR

VINOTH CLIMATIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDY

PRIYA SIGNAL TRANSMISSION AND COMMUNICATION

SURENDHAR AERODYNAMICS
KUMAR

JOHN DE STRUCTURES AND MATERIAL

BRITTO

6. SOFTWARES USED

S NO SOFTWARE
1 MATLAB
2 ANSYS
3 CATIA V5

7. LIST OF GUIDANCE TOPICS

S NO TOPICS
1 Implementation of Horizontal wind model
2 Hybrid Airship performance calculation
3 Energy balance calculation
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8. ACTION PLAN
As we have internals examinations during the last week of january and first week of
february, further works on the project will be continued from 4th february.

Our next steps are:

S ACTION TIMELINE
NO
1 Making a detailed study on Environmental Conditions, and wind 04/02/2020
modelling off the locations to
8/02/2020
2 Calculation of weight estimation on airships and preliminary 09/02/2020
sizing and performance calculation to
12/02/2020
3 Calculation of power required by the sysem, and maximum power 13/02/2020
available from the solar cells and selection of storage system to
20/02/2020
4 Designing a 3D cad model in CATIA V5 21/02/2020
to
23/02/2020
5 Flow analysis and structural analysis of the deigned model in 23/02/2020
ANSYS workbench and ANSYS Mechanical APDL to
30/02/2020

9. CONCLUSION
We have successfully chosen the configuration and we know the major preliminary
constraints that is going to drive the design. Now we have to proceed with preliminary sizing
and weight estimation as driven by the requirements. Still we need to study about the ambient
winds that are going to be encountered by our platform and the amount of solar energy available
during the course of mission.
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10. REFERENCES

1. Carichner, E., Nicolai, M. Fundamentals of Aircraft and Airships design , 2013

Published by (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc).
2. Aaron Altman. Design Methodology for Low Speed High Altitude Long Endurance
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, , 1998 (University of Dayton)
3. Romeo, G. Design of a high-altitude long-endurance solar-powered unmanned air
vehicle for multi-payload and operations , 2006 (Department of Aerospace
Engineering) Turin Polytechnic University, Italy.
4. Raymer, D. P. Aircraft design: a conceptual approach, 1999 (AIAA Education
Series, New York).
5. Nickol, L., Guynn, D., Kohout, L. High Altitude Long Endurance Air Vehicle
Analysis of Alternatives and Technology Requirements Development,2019 (NASA
Langley Research Center)
6. John Anderson, D. Fundamentals of Flight dynamics,3rd edition