Published Paper Details:

The UAV's canard is utilised to balance loads, enhance nose lift characteristics, increase overall stability, and enhance stalling characteristics. The canard design of ADE DRDO's ARCHER UAV aids in the balancing of the control systems located in the nose portion. Since UAVs are primarily employed for surveillance and reconnaissance, it is expected that they would maintain their high level of stability even amid turbulence. This application benefits from a UAV with a canard configuration. The majority of the canard's components are composites, and metal fasteners are employed to secure it to the fuselage. By having superior mechanical properties in the direction of the fibre, composites offer a significant advantage over metals in terms of design characteristics. Composites are also much lighter than metals reducing the structures weight. They also can be made into any form or shape without complex fabrication process. Their main disadvantage is transverse loading conditions and high cost of material. Technology of composites used in aircraft structures highly benefits in weight reduction and increasing overall stiffness of the structure. The present work focuses on optimizing the design of the canard to reduce weight while sustaining the same loading conditions. Various iterations are run to achieve these objectives by varying the composite layer thickness, fibre orientations and number of composite layers in the canard structure. The canard being used in the UAV has been modelled on CATIA from the given aerofoil profile. A hybrid design between part modelling and surface modelling is used to model it. The finished CAD model is imported into HYPERMESH for meshing. The material properties thicknesses, orientations and failure criteria are added to the components. This meshed model is then imported into PATRAN for processing it. The boundary conditions and loads are applied in this software. This file is then imported into a solver- NASTRAN for solving the FEA problem. This analysed model is then imported into HYPERVIEW to view the results.