Hi Guys,I have a dream of designing and making an electric fixed wing UAV for civillian applications. I came up with the idea of making the airframe from a mixture of rapid prototype (rp) parts and CF box sections for the wing spars and backbone. I was looking for a STOL plane so I thought I could use a ducted fan to blow air over the aerofoil section to gain extra lift.I have lots of experience using rp to fabricate plastic parts in polycarbonate and my gut feeling tells me this would work ok for wing sections as long as it is mounted on wing spars made of cf. The polycarbonate is quite tough and it is possible to make sections down to 0.5mm thick with internal ribs and ducting.If my airframe with payload weighed 5-10 kgs what type of battery/motor combination would people suggest to use and what would be the expected duration? I am looking for high lift slow speed suitable for a camera application.Because the majority of parts would be fabricated by an rp machine, if you crash or damage the uav you can just print off some more parts. Also customers of the new UAV could buy into a maintenance package to include hardware updates they can just print off and build.You could also sell licenses to allow them to build their own fleet of UAV's!!Anyway what do you think, is this muddle headed dreaming or could it work?Please respond all replies gratefully recievedOliver
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Anytime you use your brain for positive and creative ideas you are NOT wasting your time. I think it will be a little while before civilian applications gain popularity but I think it is something that is going to happen eventually. On what scale who knows, technology is changing so fast that soon the UAV's being built today will be old compared to components getting smaller and entities looking for micro flying objects. Just my opinion. As far as the specs for your project you must first determine the mission of the vehicle. What I would do is identify what you want to do with it and what components you need to complete the mission then try to build around that.
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