Structural Design Aspects and Criteria for Military UAV
Abstract
Structural design criteria have been developed over decades for manned air vehicles, serving a variety of missions, service requirements and environmental conditions. These criteria used have been evolved and advanced for large fleets of manned platforms using the experience from ground and flight tests and thousands of mission flight hours for different usage scenarios and military certification requirements. New systems like unmanned air vehicles are now in various stages of conceptual design, development or production. These unmanned systems may use either variations of the design criteria for manned air vehicles to fulfill similar requirements where applicable and new design criteria where specific unique weapons system capabilities are demanded, along with certification guidelines being formulated by authorities to operate the vehicle in various classes of airspaces. The intent of this paper is to present some UAV design aspects and structural design criteria based on current projects and in view of initial proposals for European UAV regulations (e.g. CS23 / USAR) emphasizing the importance of UAV specific Structural Design Criteria, i.e. definition of limit / ultimate load conditions (factor of safety no pilot in the loop), structural safety provisions for UAV's, aspects of flight envelope definition (e.g. FCS controlled / protected envelope, etc.). Also possible future design drivers with pilot based restrictions removed for high agile maneuvering for UCAV's are considered together with new aspects like transport requirements (sea, road, air).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA479056
Entities
People
- Georg Guenther
- Konrad Fuellhas
- Martin Neubauer