Assessment of Filament Deposition Aero-Modelling for UAV Design Development

Due to the large applications field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in civil, military, and scientific activities, with the associated missions’ specific operating points requirements, there is a need for a large amount of experimental and numerical testing for new concepts development. In aerodynamic studies, aeromodelling or more specifically; small scale models, are often used in wind tunnel testing or numerical simulations thanks to Reynolds number similarity. On another hand, the possible uses of additive manufacturing (AM) have significantly increased in recent years, due to the freedom it offers for the manufacture of complex parts and the reduced cycle time to manufacturing, in contrast to conventional processes. For rapid aero-models manufacturing, we focus in this work on the filament deposition modelling (FDM), which is the most affordable, compared to other AM technics. But, before going from CAD to physical model, some preliminary assessments of the process fidelity have to be introduced. In this context, the aim of our present paper is the manufacture of a small scale UAV Blended Wing Body (BWB) using FDM for subsonic wind tunnel testing. The results of the models in the wind tunnel are compared to numerical results obtained from XFLR5, and then the process fidelity is discussed.