It’s Alive! Ames Engineers Harvest and Print Parts for New Breed of Aircraft

It’s more an engineer’s dream than nightmare – to rapidly prototype and redesign aircraft using 3-D printed parts. That’s just what a team of student interns and engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, got to do: custom-build aircraft by repurposing surplus Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Grafting fuselages side-by-side adds more motors, propellers and batteries to improve power and performance capacity. By lengthening the wings, the team was able to improve aerodynamic efficiency and help extend the flight time of small, lightweight electric aircraft.
The prototype aircraft are constructed using components from Aerovironment RQ-14 Dragon Eye UAVs that NASA acquired from the United States Marine Corps via the General Services Administration’s San Francisco office. Unmodified, these small electric aircraft weigh 5.9 pounds, have a 3.75-foot wingspan and twin electric motors, and can carry a one-pound instrument payload for up to an hour. NASA can use these Dragon Eyes to penetrate the dangerous airspace within the plume of the volcanoes because their electric motors do not ingest and are not affected by the contaminated air. The Dragon Eyes are proving to be an effective way to gather crucial data about volcanic ash and gas emissions….

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Image Credit: NASA