The Sunriser - A Design study in Solar Powered Flight

The design task for last year students in Aircraft Design at Linköping University was to design a manned solar powered aircraft. The mission was to survey the U.S./Mexican borderline in search for possible intruders. The Sunriser began as a sole paper project, but quite soon we felt a need to prove that solar powered flight really was feasible. Thus the decision was made to design and build a solar powered demonstrator of our own design.

The demonstrator aircraft, a radio controlled model aircraft named “the Sunrazor”, was designed, built and flown with good result.

This paper deals with the basic theory of sun powered flight and describes the basic thoughts and design considerations which finally led to the configurations chosen.