Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. FLOR will redefine the paradigms under which remote pilots and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems have been designed and operated during the last decades; i.e. a dedicated crew manages a single aircraft, indistinctive from being the latter manned or unmanned. Most of the existing and ongoing investigations related to the insertion of RPAS into air traffic have addressed the impact of operating a single aircraft. However, it has never been considered the advantatges of operating of a fleet of RPAS managed within a dedicated ground facility involving a specialised team of remote pilots. Currently, only the military applies RPAS in a large scale, and although in that specific environment the pressure to reduce operational costs is increasingly high, nevertheless the armed services do not have to face the pressure of an open market. FLOR intends to investigate the requirements for a new generation of RPAS systems that support a revolutionary operational paradigm: each pilot operates multiple RPAS in a certain phase of flight; pilots transfer the flight responsavility as the RPAS operation progresses. FLOR improves the way in which RPAS operators employ both aircraft and remote pilots, especially in terms of economic efficiency and safety. The improvements will come from multiple sources, such as a better exploitation of the vehicle availability as it will not be limited to the capabilities or duty time of a single crew. Further improvements are a more advantageous use of personnel resources. Each individual can be allocated to a certain tasks that better fit his competences and capabilities and those tasks may be adjusted dynamically over time. Pilots may supervise multiple RPAs during the extensive and uneventful cruise portions of flights, while may focus on individual vehicles to manage the critical parts of the flight, or to respond to emergency/abnormal situations. The ground based flight control of the aircraft fleet is improved by centralizing the RPAS piloting in a small network of highly capable infrastructures which will guarantee the desired levels of certification, fault-tolerance, and service continuity. Finally, from a safety perspective, the possibility of transferring the control of the RPAS for a change of pilot or to another piloting centre in case of need, will allow an unprecedented extra safety measure. The FLOR concept will prove effective for extensive commercial point-to-point cargo operations, but also when conducting surveillance operations, e.g. disaster monitoring with a fleet of MALE/HALE RPAS or operating a fleet of solar powered RPAS slowly loitering at extremely high altitude. This issue is often addressed as some of the most feasible deployment of RPAS, as those operations might be dangerous or exhausting for pilots in manned aircraft. Within the most recent European Commissions update of the Aviation Strategy for Europe the huge potential of drones in the sense of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) is highlighted. EC is asking for R&D in reducing risks associated to UAS. In addition EC sees the need for improving related technologies and operations to unleash their full market potential. FLOR paves the way for the efficient application of UAS operated as RPAS with respect to their fleet management and control. Peer Reviewed

Abstract

It is estimated that the aeronautic industry in the European Union produces annually around 10 tn of uncured prepreg scraps, generated mainly from manual and automated lamination processes of composites, and that the treatment cost for these residues is between 3 and 12 € per kilogram.

This work presents a technology for the reuse of the unidirectional prepreg scrap using a machine that allows the manufacturing companies, mainly form aeronautic sector, the reuse and valorisation of the leftovers of PREPREG in the workshop, involving a reduction in the economic and environmental impact.

The developed solution consists in a machine able to perform the needed processes to reuse the prepreg scrap leftovers in an automatic and efficient way, maintaining the quality and the material properties for the manufacturing of non-critical components. The equipment integrates different technologies that include computer vision to identify the shape of the leftovers and the fibre direction, cutting technology to generate regular rectangular chips aligned with the fibre direction, and a robotic system to pick and place the chips generating an ordered pattern.

The result of the process is a material sheet aiming to control the mechanical properties by using homogeneous chips with controlled fibre orientation following a predefined pattern.

Abstract

In recent years, lightweight structures have gained importance due to increasingly stringent environmental legislations. This situation is especially critical for the transport sector and, especially, for the automotive sector where, in parallel, there is a strong competitiveness. In this context, it should be noted that traditionally manufacturing processes for structural composite materials involver high TAKT times, which has limited their implementation. Thus, the resin transfer molding manufacturing process and, more specifically, its recently developed thermoplastic version (TP-RTM) has been identified as a route with great potential for mass manufacturing.

Within the framework of the European LEVIS project, the development of a suspension arm made entirely of composite materials has been studied. This study focuses on the development of the process window of the preforming stage, one of the most critical for the development of complex geometries. In this sense, automated taping technology has broken few years ago, allowing the improvement of robustness and productivity. Specifically, a wide range of materials has been studied and important parameters such as fibre deposition pressures and temperatures have been analysed. On the other hand, to optimize the TP-RTM, several aspects have been studied, such as viscosity of the resin, the curing cycle of the resin, the compatibility of the resin, the curing cycle of the resin with the dry fibre and the study of the optimal parameters for the resin injection.