The Design, Analysis, Construction and Testing of an Uninhabited Aero Vehicle Platform

Abstract

An uninhabited aero vehicle platform design is presented. This encompasses the landing gear system and the structures of the vehicle. The landing gear system consisted of the design, construction and testing of the main and nose gears. The testing of the landing gear resulted in a valid system that could then be integrated into the vehicle. The vehicle structures are composed of various configurations of composite sandwiches. Extensive material testing was conducted to experimentally produce the physical properties of the materials. These properties and techniques can be utilized by other vehicle designs. The structural design was refined and ultimately verified within a finite element analysis program, ANSYS. This analysis implemented a composite shell element that utilized all of the material properties gained from the material testing. This work resulted in an analyzed and constructed vehicle. Ultimately the vehicle was load tested to verify the analytical results.