Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been developed to perform various military and civilian applications, such as reconnaissance, attack missions, surveillance of pipelines, and interplanetary exploration.
There is a need to develop a fast adaptable UAV design technologies for agile, fuel efficient, and flexible structures that are capable of adapting and operating in any environments. For this purpose, the engineers Seung Ki Moon, Yu En Tan, Jihong Hwang and Yong-Jin Yoon are improving current design methods and knowledge of deployable technologies in the area of engineering design and manufacturing.
More specifically, they seeks to identify one truss lattice with the optimal elastic performance for deployable UAV wing design according to the Hashin & Shtrikman theoretical bounds. They propose three lattice designs (3D Kagome structure, 3D pyramidal structure and the hexagonal diamond structure) to be fabricated using an Objet 350 3D printer while the material chosen is a polypropylene-like photopolymer called Objet DurusWhite RGD430.
