Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as UAVs, are increasingly being used in various applications, from agriculture to the military sector. However, their short flight times, limited by battery life, are still a limiting factor for some applications. Nowadays, the development of photovoltaic cells technology has made them lighter and more flexible, enabling the use of these devices in UAVs, for example. Therefore, it is necessary to use an intermediate circuit allowing the solar cell to charge the battery during the flight. Thus, the current work shows a study on photovoltaic cells, beginning with their history from its creation to the present days, following by the description of main characteristics and operation of a generic solar cell and experimental evaluation of the behavior of a specific model (RC7.2). Finally, there were performed analysis of circuits for charging LiPO batteries by means of photovoltaic energy through computational simulations.