Abstract
In recent years the design and development of various classes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) has grown significantly. It is a well-known fact that the utilization of composite structures will reduce the weight of the aircraft structure by 30–50%. It is possible to tailor the strength and stiffness properties of composite structures by adopting different material or lamination configurations. In this work redesign of the Tail Sitter (Vertical Take Off and Landing/VTOL) UAV wing is carried out in order to improve the performance by reduction of the weight. Numerical investigation is carried out to reduce the weight of the wing by replacing the existing Aluminum frame with different ply configurations of CFRP and GFRP and also by reducing number of spars. The strength and stiffness of the UAV wing was analysed by Finite Element Method. Baseline analysis was carried out on the Aluminium structure by applying the span wise lift distribution along the wing based on Dr Ing Oster Schrenk’s Approximation method. For the VTOL UAV configuration the wing has to carry the motor, so structurally wing should have higher stiffness-to weight ratio to carry the high loads. The present work was focussed on analysis of different ply configurations of CFRP as well as GFRP using FE methods in order to get better performance in terms of weight reduction. The analysis was done by configuring the whole wing frame along with spars and ribs, which gave high stiffness to the wing compared to the Conventional wing. From the CFD analysis, it is evident that composite wing had less deformation compared to the aluminium wing and the wing structure was redesigned using CFRP and GFRP based composites. Effect of lay-up configuration on the performance is also studied for composite wing. Due to high stiffness to weight ratio of composite wing it is found there is a reduction in weight of the wing by 44.17% compare to aluminium. A redesign of the wing is done by having a composite frame of two spars and five Ribs.
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