Aerospace Manufacturing Techniques

Through my MIT Beaverworks Projects focused on UAVs, I learned various manufacturing techniques used in the aerospace industry. These include:

• Foam Milling

• Hand Lay-up, an open molding process with fiberglass. Thermosetting resin with a curing agent is applied to the fiber glass reinforcement. Air is removed by vacuum to insure complete wet out and wet through.

• Preforming, an intermediate molding process whereby the reinforcement is assembled in the shape of the part to be molded.

MIT Beaverworks is a collaboration between MIT Lincoln Labs and MIT’s Aero-Astro department. Demand for the project grew out of Lincoln’s high expenditures from flying manned radar calibration missions and their desire to have a lower cost and more flexible radar calibration system. The project team included 36 undergraduate and 8 graduate students, 3 faculty members, 5 teaching/lab staff, and 2 research assistants.

The solution includes the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The vehicle employs a fixed wing twin-boom vehicle with a two-stroke engine mounted in the pusher configuration. The vehicle’s detachable nose cone serves as an accommodating structure for multiple payloads due to its isolation from the other vehicle systems, which is made possible by placing the propeller and engine behind the wing. Longer VHF antennas are attached to the empennage in a longitudinal direction and are provided ample separation from metal or component electromagnetic interference (EMI).