Development of the Structure of a long Endurance Electric UAV

• Autor(a) principal: Duarte, Alexandre Emanuel Guerreiro
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/6529
• topic: Análise Estrutural; Energia Solar; Estruturas Em Compósito; Teste Estrutural.; Uav; Voo de Grande Autonomia; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

The goal of this project is to design and create the structure of a long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using solar power. The design’s main requirement was the creation of a low weight structure to handle diverse missions with a 1 Kilogram of payload. The UAV structure was divided in three parts: fuselage, empennages and empennage support, designed using CATIA® to verify interfaces and to study the positioning of the systems access and functionality. Because the main target is to build a low weight structure, the carbon fibre and wood were chosen for the fuselage, empennage support and tail, respectively. Two methods of structure analyses were used to design the composite structures, one a numerical analysis and the other the finite element method from ANSYS®. The UAV structure was manufactured in two phases. First was the composite structure using the hand lay-up and vacuum bagging method. And the second was the empennage structure using balsa wood construction. When the UAV structure was finished, a structural test was carried out to verify both analysis and manufacturing methods.