A student team at the prestigious University of Warwick School of Engineering in Coventry, England, has designed an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with the ability to deliver immediate aid and equipment to people in trouble, before a rescue team arrives.
The project’s design lead, Ed Barlow (who has since graduated), knew he had a large-format 3D printer at his disposal. And that meant the team could design and manufacture something different than existing UAVs for aid and supply drops, such as the drones US startup Zipline uses to deliver blood and plasma to Rwandan hospitals: “They all use an airframe that you can go and buy from a shop,” Barlow says. “We needed our own custom airframe, made specifically for long-distance flight with a heavy payload.”
Warwick Associate Professor of Engineering Simon Leigh, who specializes in Additive Manufacturing, guided Barlow’s team during the project. He knew they would 3D-print reusable molds of the UAV body parts and then use them to resin-infuse strong-yet-light carbon fiber to create the finished product. Leigh says it took about one month of continuous 3D printing to finish the molds. After that, infusing the carbon fiber proved a challenge, as well: “We used liquid-resin infusion, which is under the vacuum,” Barlow says. “You apply a vacuum to your carbon fiber on the mold, and then you inject resin into it under the vacuum. That’s generally done on a much bigger scale, with much easier geometric parts than we were using, so we had to invent a lot of really cool tools to do it.”
