Maximum endurance for battery-powered rotary-wing aircraft

The paper presents an analytical framework for addressing the hovering time prediction of rotary-wing aircraft, with a particular focus on multi-rotor platforms. By imposing the balance between required and available power, the endurance expression is derived as a function of airframe features, rotor parameters, and battery capacity. The best endurance condition is also obtained in terms of optimum capacity and hovering time, by means of two approximate closed-form solutions. The proposed methodology was validated by means of numerical simulation and flight testing. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.