Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

UAVs Take Off with the Help of Composites and Fibersim™ Software

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) go by a variety of names (Unmanned Aerial Systems, drones, pilotless aircraft), are used for a number of tasks (reconnaissance, cargo hauling, combat missions), and can be called upon to fly anywhere from a few minutes to over 24 hours at a time.

However, regardless of its mission, one thing applies to all UAVs: The lighter the better. As a result, composite materials play a highly significant role in the engineering and manufacturing of UAVs around the world.

And the demand for UAVs is booming because unmanned military flight provides a number of benefits, including eliminating the possibility of loss of life; reducing manpower requirements by enabling a ground cockpit to control multiple vehicles; and saving money since UAVs are a lot less expensive to produce than traditional aircraft and feature lower operating and support costs.

So it’s no surprise that as the world’s leading engineering software for the composites industry, Vistagy’s Fibersim plays a key role in streamlining the design-to-manufacturing process for a number of companies that produce UAVs. Fibersim is a suite of software that is integrated into major commercial 3D CAD software systems, which reduces the cost and time required to develop composite parts by automating many design tasks while accommodating multiple manufacturing processes.

Fibersim is used to perform detailed part design, assess producibility, and compile and generate manufacturing data and documentation for UAV components such as fuselage skins and frames, fairings, landing gear, keel beam structures, wing and tail skins, spars, and ribs. Fibersim enables UAV manufacturers to efficiently design composite parts that meet the unique requirements of their specific manufacturing processes and constraints, ultimately improving product performance and reliability while reducing development time and manufacturing cost. Reducing development time is essential due to the rapid deployment requirements of the UAV market.

Fibersim enables UAV manufacturers to dramatically improve their composite parts and processes by providing the ability to achieve:

• Detailed, iterative structural analysis that is essential to engineering reduced weight in composite structures. Fibersim’s industry-leading solutions for creating composite product definitions and communicating them with analysis tools provide a fast and reliable method to optimize designs for weight and performance
• Granular definitions of the composite structure, leading to a more accurate understanding of the structure’s behavior
• Less expensive manufacturing techniques for composite structures, thus helping to reduce costs through part consolidation and reduced fabrication time

Fibersim’s unique capabilities to support tradeoffs and what-if scenarios, in which the advantages of part consolidation can be evaluated, provide critical information to assess design alternatives. Further, Fibersim provides a straightforward way of communicating critical manufacturing information, such as flat patterns, laser projection data, and data for automated fiber placement processes, to the factory floor. This helps aerospace manufacturers meet the growing demand for UAVs by speeding up throughput time and reducing errors.

Click here to learn more about Fibersim composite engineering software.