Double-Double Laminate Composites for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The successful combination of low weight and high strength is envisaged for an optimised aeronautical structure. The use of composite materials is particularly attractive to meet the required challenging weight saving. Nowadays, the use of these materials is established for many structural components of modern aircrafts, such as the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 787, while their adoption for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as drones, which is progressively increasing, especially for civil applications, such as fire prevention, emergency operations, surveillance, and research missions. In this paper, the redesign of an aluminium drone components have been re-performed by using carbon fibre composite materials, with the aim to lighten the overall structure of the drone and to increase its strength. Conventional quasi-isotropic stacking sequence has been considered to study the performance of the structure under operational tensile and torsional loads. Later, a sensitivity analysis has been performed to find a new design configuration with Double-Double laminates [1–4]. The different materials and stacking sequences have been compared to find the best combination between performances and weight.