From MDO to manufacturing: application case for unmanned aerial vehicles
De la MDO à la fabrication : cas d'application pour les drones
Résumé
This paper explores the concept of coupling an MDO problem directly to a manufacturing process. The design parameters required for various disciplinary analyses are used to automatically generate geometries that comply with the selected manufacturing processes. Such geometries are then manufactured to validate our proposal. This strategy reduces the manufacturing time of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the CAD modeling becomes automatic and parametric, also allowing for easier comparison of different geometries. It can also potentially improve the MDO process by closing the information loop with manufacturing constraints. We employ the Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP) and leverage from additive manufacturing techniques usually applied in UAVs. The choice of ESP facilitates reproducibility, as it is an operating system agnostic open source CAD, and gradient based optimization, due to its capability of computing gradients of the geometric outputs with respect to the design parameters. The manufacturing processes of wings and propellers are addressed. For the same representative wing geometry, we present different modeling strategies for mass and inertia prediction and for manufacturing using 3D printing. ESP is also employed to predict wing mass and inertia. The maximum difference in weight between the manufactured wing and its predicted value using ESP is roughly 7%. The propeller is 3D printed in resin with stereolithography (SLA) technique, and is defined by means of its airfoils, radius, and chord and twist angle distributions. We conclude about the applicability of the presented strategy, as well as its potential and limitations. All the scripts are shared with the community so researchers can apply it to validate their own MDO problem.
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