Effect of Glass Fibers and Aramid Fiber on Mechanical Properties of Composite Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Skin

The use of carbon-based fiber that can disrupt radar signal transmission on the flights especially on UAV remains problem. To address the problem, composites based UAV skin using E-glass, S-glass and aramid fibres as well as epoxy resin has been successfully manufactured by vacuum infusion process. Full factorial design of experiment (DoE) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed using Minitab 16 to analyse the effects of layer variations on specific tensile, compression and bonding shear. Fiber configuration was divided into two layers, namely layer 1–9 and 10–18. In general, mechanical properties i.e. tensile strength, bonding shears and compression strength increased compared with epoxy resin properties. Tensile strength and modulus increased by 484% and 204% respectively, while bonding shear and compressive strength increased by 24226% and 94% respectively. The overall result indicated that the best properties of composites-based UAV skin were obtained by the utilization of aramid fiber.