For Benjamin David, founder of the start-up XSun, “the growth of the drone sector has two main obstacles: their low autonomy and safety regulations.” To meet this double challenge, he found inspiration in the aerospace sector he came from: transposing the concept of satellites to a finer altimetric scale to design an autonomous and resilient solar drone. So was born the SolarXOne project.
Powered by photovoltaic cells and monitored remotely from a ground control, SolarXOne is an effective, economical and sustainable solution. Its uniqueness: a double-support wing that increases the surface available to host photovoltaic cells and ensure optimal flight performance.
Accelerated by the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, XSun is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to enable its teams to effectively design, simulate and test its drone, thanks to the Reinvent the Sky solution.
XSun’s major challenge is to optimize a complex system and find the best compromises according to requirements in terms of structure, loads, position, and internal volume, among others. Studying these constraints is inherently trans-disciplinary and requires high-performance design, digital simulation and collaboration tools.
“The SolarXOne drone bundles technologies from different sciences and disciplines—design, engineering, simulation, composite, prototyping and testing—that are not necessarily used to working together,” David said. “The 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables us to design and consolidate all our data on a single location, to keep a unique, clear and clean configuration of all the subsystems."
The cloud gives XSun exceptional agility. “It provides remote access to powerful design and simulation tools,” David said. “We can easily connect to the platform, even when we’re away or at a partner site, as an echo of our core concept: our machines can easily fly anywhere and in a very simple way.”
Denis Pitance, a test engineer at XSun agrees, “Using Dassault Systèmes’ cloud offering was an obvious choice,” he said. “I travel a lot and my office is never in the same place. Being able to access my files from anywhere is absolutely essential.”
To learn more about how XSun is using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud, read the full case study.
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