Weight reduction, analysis and optimization of UAV wings

Weight is an important issue in aviation. Efforts to reduce the weight of aircraft have become very important today. When weights are reduced, the advantages of loading more cargo on aircraft, reducing fuel consumption, and staying in the air for longer periods are provided. Additionally, carbon emissions also decrease. With all these advantages, efforts to develop lighter and stronger structures in aviation continue. It is very important to reduce the weight of UAVs, whose use has been increasing recently. Thanks to UAVs, useful tasks can be easily carried out by remote control. In this thesis, an optimized design is achieved by reducing the weight of the structural elements on the wings of UAVs. Weight reduction is important in wings, which constitute a large part of the weight of the aircraft. First, a reference UAV wing model is designed in the ANSYS program, and a composite material is selected and analyzed under the static load. According to the analysis results, a weight comparison of the new design and the reference design is made. In the first designed model, regions whose weight could be reduced are determined. The composite material thicknesses of the determined areas are reduced, and the layer orientations are changed. The optimized second model design is also analyzed again, and the design is confirmed to be safe using the Tsai-Wu damage criterion. The weight of the reference UAV is reduced by 16.2% with the optimized design. With this study, the areas on the UAV wing that are exposed to the highest load are observed and the parts that suffered less deformations are identified. As a result, it is observed that lighter designs can be created according to the loads that the wing is exposed to when designing the UAV wing.