Additive Manufacturing of Porous Structures for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Applications

• Published in: Advanced engineering materials 2018-09, Vol.20 (9), p.n/a
• Main Authors: Klippstein, Helge, Hassanin, Hany, Diaz De Cerio Sanchez, Alejandro, Zweiri, Yahya, Seneviratne, Lakmal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: acrylonitrile‐butadiene‐styrene (ABS); additive manufacturing (AM); fused deposition modeling (FDM); infill analysis topology optimization (TO); unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)
• ISSN: 1438-1656; 1527-2648
• DOI: 10.1002/adem.201800290

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown promising benefits in many applications. This has been enabled by the emergence of additive manufacturing (AM), which give the designers a large amount of geometrical freedom. In this paper, a novel design process of fused deposition modeling (FDM) combining both topology and infill optimization is introduced for AM of high performance porous structures. Tensile testing of FDM printed samples is first carried out to study the effect of the build orientation on the mechanical properties of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) samples. It is found that samples built perpendicular to the load axis are the weakest with a tensile strength of 29 MPa and Young's modulus of 1960 MPa. The materials properties are fed to the finite elements analysis (FEA) for geometrical topology optimization, aiming to maximize stiffness and reduce weight of those parts. Afterwards, an infill optimization is carried out on the topology optimized parts using different mesostructures such as honeycomb, triangular, and rectangular to achieve high structural performance. The results showed that triangular pattern with 50% infill density had the lowest developed stresses, less mass, and strain energy when compared to other structures. Optimum UAVs parts of a quadcopter are successfully manufactured, assembled, and tested. Topology and infill optimization are used to design high performance porous structures. Triangular shape infill with 50% porosity has the lowest developed stresses when compared to rectangular and honeycomb structures and therefore is used to build functional parts of unmanned Ariel vehicle.