Resilient and Lightweight Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Extreme Environment

Unmanned aerial vehicle systems (UAV) were originally made for military purposes, although their applications are expanding in security, monitoring, communications, and logistics. One of the most growing aspects of UAV is its ability to work in harsh environments for search & rescue or fire & rescue services. Grenfell Tower fire incident in London showed the important of designing UAVs for extreme environment. One of the main reasons behind deaths of casualties in a wide area search scenario is speed of response, and ground covered in effective search, so a fast moving resilient multi-sensor UAV platform will address part of that.

On the other hand, 3D printing technologies have a tremendous impact on industrial and consumer areas in the coming years. The greatest advantage of 3D printing is that it gives designers the freedom to design parts with complex geometries. This gives extraordinary chance to design lighter UAV systems.

The aim of this project is to develop a resilient multi-rotor based flying platform to meet the requirements for extreme working environmental such as fire, high temperature, high corrosion environment, and strong winds, assuring the capability of carrying different payloads.

The work includes development of materials and coatings of 3D printed parts for harsh environment applications, topology optimisation and enhancement of UAV functionality using finite element analysis, aerodynamics study of the developed high performance parts fabricated for harsh environment working conditions using computational fluid dynamics CFD, and construction and evaluation of the developed UAV. The research outputs fall under SEC Faculty new “Disaster management” banner

The project objectives are:
• Define specific requirements for UAVs for harsh environment applications.
• Identify materials, formulation, and coating techniques for harsh environment.
• Define a cost effective process chain to develop 3D printed parts with high functionality and resistance to sever environment.
• Manufacture and characterisation of test samples.
• Study the effect of changing the process parameters and coatings on the mechanical, thermal resistance of the 3D printed parts.
• Topology optimisation and enhancement of UAV functionality using Finite element analysis.
• Aerodynamics study of the developed parts using computational fluid dynamics CFD.
• Construction and testing of the developed UAVs

The proposed research includes multidisciplinary areas of research such as materials processing, 3D printing, unmanned aerial vehicles, control, and sensors. This complex environment represents a challenging and new research direction combining different areas of research to develop novel autonomous technology and produce resilient multi-robot sensing solution.