The Lambach Research Team is focused on investigating the theoretical aspect of manufacturing and designing unmanned aircraft of smaller sizes (to support the other Lambach projects), as well as of the implementation of promising new technologies in full-scale aircraft.
The underlying goal of the team is to improve Lambach’s technical and theoretical understanding, while perfecting its manufacturing capability.
Currently, the team is focussed on creating an optimal and more-or-less universal way of manufacturing wings for aircraft used in other Lambach projects. Previously, this process caused issues for some teams resulting in the waste of valuable time. Creating a standardised method (that can be modified and perfected as it is being used), could be beneficial for the operation of the teams in Lambach in general.
The team aims to achieve this first goal in following way:
1)Choose the best material for each wing structure element by:
Manufacturing the parts from a shortlist of materials deemed reasonable for that element.
Testing the parts separately if necessary(for example, for the spars, a three point bending test could be used).
Testing the different combinations of materials for endurance and performance.
Ranking the materials, while considering the weight, cost(and ease of manufacturing) into account.
2)Come up with an optimal manufacturing procedure, considering the tools and machines that are to be used.
3)Present the results in a cohesive report, such that it could be used and/or edited by other teams in Lambach.
When this first project is done, the team plans to delve into larger projects with higher complexity of the theoretical background. Topics such as morphing wings, plasma actuators, blended body aircraft and ion propulsion are of particular interest.
