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Platform one 14 VulcanUAV has teamed up with Graphite Additive Manufacturing to reduce the weight of key components, with the aim of helping to boost UAV flight times and battery life (writes Nick Flaherty). The companies analysed a recently manufactured UAV and identified clips, brackets and components that could be optimised to reduce material and weight while retaining strength and stiffness in critical areas. With advances in materials such as carbon fibre and graphite-filled nylon, 3D-printed parts now offer UAV manufacturers an alternative to traditionally machined ones. However, designing with the manufacturing process in mind is a key challenge for developers, but ensuring the design is appropriate for 3D printing can offer UAV manufacturers tangible weight gains. VulcanUAV and Graphite AM are exploring aluminium and titanium selective layer sintering (SLS) to find out which areas of their manufacturing process could benefit. Metal sintering still has a long way to go to be a cost- effective solution for many components but new printers and powder-based materials are coming to the market. Graphite AM has a high-volume SLS printer that enables the production of multiple parts in a single build, and the company has recently produced more than 3000 parts in one build using materials developed in-house. The printer will be running graphite and carbon-reinforced nylon materials that produce lightweight and durable parts such as baffles, brackets, clips, UAV bodies and ducts. Materials The SLS process offers lighter UAV components without sacrificing mechanical strength Weight-loss plan for UAVs December/January 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology TotalSim has developed a web-based application for streamlining the process of running CFD simulations and analysis on small unmanned aircraft designs (writes Rory Jackson). Known as Aero, the app started out as a qualitative analysis tool to examine the flow field over a vehicle and perform other experiments such as observing the wake from a UAV’s wing, to see if it interacted adversely with the tail or caused buffeting against the fuselage. As development progressed, TotalSim began to notice that the qualitative results appeared to compare well with higher fidelity analysis. Eventually the results seemed accurate enough to provide quantitative data analysis for airframe performance, endurance, range and other factors. In addition to performing qualitative flow-field prediction for early-stage flight vehicle design, the Aero software does away with the complex type of input set- up often associated with CFD programs, and instead uses a minimal interface. It also provides automatic meshing, CFD solve functionality and post-processing capabilities for producing images and movies from the simulations and analyses. The company says multi-rotor UAS developers in particular will benefit from using this simplified software. Multicopters are more flexible and controllable than fixed-wing platforms, although they use more energy and are less aerodynamically efficient, particularly in the design and selection of their propellers and their placement around the body of the craft. Development of the software is continuing, although early versions of it are already in use by some customers, as is a variant called Automotive for manned and driverless automotive users. Web app simplifies CFD Software