Quadcopter Drone
Project Overview
The goal of this project was to design a quadcopter capable of remote-controlled flight. Another goal was for the drone to be easy to fabricate using 3D-printing.
This project was completed as part of a course called “Product Design Realization” at the University of Iowa. The design and animation were made in Creo Parametric, and FEA was conducted on the drone arms to validate the design using Abaqus.
Final Design & FEA Results
The final quadcopter design is 3D-printable and consists of 11 total components. The total mass of this drone is approximately 411.5 grams, which meets all established project requirements.
In order to conduct finite-element analysis, the drone arm was analyzed for static loading to ensure that it could support flight without failure. To do so, a set of loading and boundary conditions were established, and the maximum von Mises stress and vertical displacement were calculated.
The arm experiences a maximum von Mises stress of 3.459 MPa near the edges of the mounting holes, which will be reduced with the bolt and nut installation. This is relatively small compared to the rated tensile strength of PLA (which is approx. 59 MPa). The arm experiences a maximum vertical displacement of 0.03013 mm. The magnitude of this expected displacement is so small that it should not cause issues in the drone's ability to sustain controlled flight.
