FURI | Spring 2021

Weight and Moment Estimations for Small Fixed-Wing UAVs

Currently the weight of small UAVs cannot be accurately estimated by the commonly used empirical equations that were derived for full-sized aircraft. As weight and their related moments of inertia are critical for early clean sheet design. A tool is developed to estimate these values through rigorous stress and physics-based methods. This is done on Excel taking input parameters of a UAV configuration then estimating weight and their moments with consideration to stress, buckling, volume, and required components. It is important that this tool can be rapidly iterated through to produce the required data for many configurations.