Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), NSF NHERI 2025: Development of a Characterization Methodology for Composite Plates in UAV Wing Applications

Prior to taking flight, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) must be designed, tested, and built under careful consideration of the loading from flying and the design’s sequential response. Composite materials have emerged as an effective method for achieving the most beneficial material characteristics in the least amount of square footage. This has led to their increased use in the field of aerospace, including UAVs, which is an area subjected to rigorous testing to meet high-quality standards as is. Due to the customization of such composites and the importance of their resulting material properties to safely achieve flight, emphasized testing must be done to ensure they reach that goal. The objective is to create a test protocol to both statically and dynamically evaluate custom fiberglass-epoxy (GFRP) composites for future use in UAV wing applications. The use of composites can make UAV designs more efficient, and more efficient UAVs are important because they excel in remote areas and traditionally inconvenient field tasks across private and public sectors. Currently, carbon fiber-epoxy (CFRP) composites have taken the field by storm, but GFRPs share similar qualities to CFRP composites, such as higher strength-to-weight ratios, but are cheaper and require less effort to cure, thus making them more accessible to smaller manufacturers and hobbyists. The project’s current GFRP design consists of hand-laid 12 inches × 6 inches glass-fiber/PVC-foam sandwich panels that are then pulled and cured through a vacuum. The testing protocol involves a custom test bed that nondestructively clamps to a test specimen plate in a cantilever beam orientation. Preliminary tests have been conducted statically and dynamically on a plexiglass mock specimen to build the test protocol’s credibility in property assessment. Static testing is necessary to find the initial property maximums of the specimens, such as stiffness and loads; verified weights were suspended from the free end of the cantilevered plates in small increments to achieve this. The dynamic methodology presently includes a small-scale shake table with manual sinusoidal inputs operated between a range of 1 to 20 Hz. These composite testing results will provide a database for UAV design, specifically aimed at fixed-wing UAVs. Our preliminary results accurately assessed our mock specimen and will provide a foundation for future work in composite characterization testing techniques, further working toward investigations into cell-level structural battery composite wings.