DEPLOYMENT DYNAMICS OF A SMALL CARBON FIBER TAPE-SPRING UAV WING

Many mechanisms exist for folding and deploying wing surfaces on micro-scale unmanned air vehicles. A rolling tape-spring style wing offers simple construction, small mass, and compact packed volume. Deployment of the wing during flight would be advantageous for autonomous MAV launch, however the deployment process presents potential buckling issues due to the deployment dynamics and aero-structure interaction. In this study a finite element model of an example wing is developed and its deployment dynamics are compared against an experimental model. Additionally, elastic material properties are estimated using model updating, comparing predicted natural frequencies to those measured by a laser vibrometer experimentally. To better evaluate the deployment dynamics of the finite element model, in experiment a vacuum chamber is used to decouple the aero and structural dynamics. The computational results are compared with the experimental finding and good agreement was observed.