Session: Government Agency Student Posters

Paper Number: 173974

Developing a Characterization Protocol for Composite Plates for 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 the most 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 designs consist of hand laid 304.8 mm × 152.4 mm glass-fiber/PVC-foam sandwich panels that are then pulled and cured through a vacuum. The testing protocol will involve a custom test bed that nondestructively clamps to a test specimen plate in a cantilever beam orientation. It is important to use nondestructive connections to keep the specimen’s natural properties on display and maintain a more realistic test environment. Preliminary tests have been conducted statically and dynamically on mock specimens of plywood and plastic, as the custom GFRPs are being developed simultaneously alongside the development of the test protocol, so similar, yet disposable specimens are required in the meantime 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 increments of 5 pounds 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 specimens and provide a foundation for future work in composite characterization testing techniques, further working toward investigations into real-time hybrid test simulations and cell-level structural battery composite wings.

Presenting Author: Sydney Morris University of South Carolina

Presenting Author Biography: Sydney Morris is a second-semester mechanical engineering senior at the University of South Carolina. Most recently, she has participated in the 2025 National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at the Lehigh Univeristy Real-time Multi-directional (RTMD) facility and has previously participated in the 2024 McNair Junior Scholars REU at the University of South Carolina in the Adaptive Real-Time Systems (ARTS) Laboratory. With a single conference publication and a few other achievements under her belt, she plans to return to the University of South Carolina to pursue a Master of Science in mechanical engineering after graduating in December 2025.

Authors:

Sydney Morris University of South Carolina
Liang Cao Lehigh University
James Ricles Lehigh University
Austin Downey University of South Carolina