Fluid Coupled Structural Analysis and Optimization of Expanded Polystyrene-Fiber-Reinforced Composite Wing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The growing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the wide range of commercial applications has necessitated engineers to develop lightweight and economical models that are simple to manufacture. This study focuses on the analysis of UAV wing a unconventionally manufactured medium altitude long endurance (MALE) by performing transient and static fluid structure interaction analysis. The wing was made of an expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam core reinforced by a glass and carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composite. The current study utilizes the one-way fluid-structure interaction technique to obtain the pressure profile from a computational fluid dynamics study, which then is used as a load boundary condition for the static and dynamic structural analyses of an EPS-reinforced composite wing to observe its failure characteristics under loading conditions. Modeling the composite laminate was conducted in the ANSYS Composite PrePost module with varying ply orientations to obtain an optimum configuration. The topology optimization of the wing core led to a 30.5% reduction in its overall weight, offering an economical and feasible solution for manufacturing UAVs on small and medium scales.