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Project Hex "Design - Build - Fly". Innovative technological solutions to produce competitive Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems

Join us on our 2-year long adventure as we take our aircraft Vulcan from the concept phase all the way to the flight line to compete in the 2023 AUVSI SUAS challenge. Follow us through our social media accounts to be kept up to date with our progress as well as our latest test flights and exciting experiments.

It's been almost a year, but Vulcan is back! Thanks to the hard work of the Manufacturing team Vulcan V3 is taking shape...
08/03/2024

It's been almost a year, but Vulcan is back! Thanks to the hard work of the Manufacturing team Vulcan V3 is taking shape in our lab. The 3.2m wingspan drone will hopefully fly later this year!

Whilst we’re tucking in to our scrumptious lunches on our six sided plates, we wish you a very merry Xmas from Project H...
25/12/2023

Whilst we’re tucking in to our scrumptious lunches on our six sided plates, we wish you a very merry Xmas from Project Hex. Wherever in the world you may be, we hope you enjoy your day eating yummy food with the people you love and we can’t wait to get back to some serious vtol engineering business in the new year 😎. Thankyou so much to everyone who has contributed to Hex this semester for all the hard work in all different teams, we are so excited to see you again! 🧡 PH 2023 big up and peaceout ✌️

Project Hex 2023-2024 🧡
11/11/2023

Project Hex 2023-2024 🧡

Project Hex 2023 - 2024 🧡
11/11/2023

Project Hex 2023 - 2024 🧡

Hi Everyone! We’ve been up to lots of different things over the past two weeks 🎃 Firstly our most experienced members ga...
08/11/2023

Hi Everyone!

We’ve been up to lots of different things over the past two weeks 🎃

Firstly our most experienced members gave a lovely presentation to third year aerospace students on how to build a VTOL drone to help with their project this year.

Our manufacturing team, seen above with team lead Milo’s thumb, made a section of Vulcan’s wing to test manufacturing processes. The wing is a foam core which is wrapped in glass fibre composite and cured in a vacuum bag. Through this we know the wing is very strong⚡️💪

Finally we produced a render of our newly designed motor mounts, which ensure the motors are securely attached to the drone. Keeping it safe 😎

Late April our Vulcan Aircraft suffered an unforeseeable mechanical failure resulting in the destruction of the airframe...
06/07/2023

Late April our Vulcan Aircraft suffered an unforeseeable mechanical failure resulting in the destruction of the airframe at our test site. As this took place during the final stages of our flight testing campaign, just a month and a half before the SUAS Competition in America, we unfortunately had to withdraw this year's entry.

Whilst this was a heartbreaking loss for the team we remain as motivated as ever to rebuild and bounce back stronger. The team has gained a wealth of knowledge and experience over the past two years, cementing ourselves as leaders in student-led drone projects, having built and flown the largest VTOL UAV ever built at The University of Sheffield

Thank you to all our sponsors, partners and supporters for your continued faith in us and we’re confident version 3 of Vulcan will not disappoint! The team has performed a thorough investigation of the cause of the incident and has already implemented improvements for the next iteration to prevent the same failure mode from ever happening again. We’d like to especially highlight Skylift for their generous support with the flight testing of Vulcan. Their advice and support was integral to getting us flying; we hope to continue working with them soon.

Even though we couldn't make it to the competition this time around we would like to present to the world all the hard work and dedication that the team put into building our beloved Vulcan and show this beast of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle taking to the skies. To this end, we will be publishing a wave of new content on all our social media channels including lots of incredible flight footage.

Join us in taking a look at what went into building this incredible machine and where we will be taking Vulcan and Project Hex from here as we learn from our experiences and prepare for the SUAS 2024 Competition.



Engineering at Sheffield

“Our jaws dropped when we walked into the room.”It’s near impossible to visualise a full-scale model as ambitious as Vul...
22/03/2023

“Our jaws dropped when we walked into the room.”

It’s near impossible to visualise a full-scale model as ambitious as Vulcan—but now we don’t have to. The pre-epoxy dry fit gave us our first ever chance to properly take in the results of our structures and manufacturing teams’ hard work. We can’t wait to share more as we progress!

We’ve seen how FEA can be used to validate components by checking the magnitudes of internal stresses, but what happens ...
20/03/2023

We’ve seen how FEA can be used to validate components by checking the magnitudes of internal stresses, but what happens as the scope of analysis increases? As engineers, we have to understand how to use tools both effectively and responsibly. One way to achieve this is to test with a varied range of techniques—for example, by complementing computational methods with real-world testing.

With our global FEA model, we faced some unique obstacles inherent to the scale of our analysis and the resources available.

As we saw last week, the mesh presents an important tradeoff to consider: a finer mesh provides more accurate and detailed results in a high-quality model, but mesh refinement eventually becomes unfeasible or even impossible with the time, RAM, and computational power available for a project. Likewise, real-world complexities like plasticity are demanding to model, and it takes extensive experience and a solid grasp of the theory to judge when they can just be simplified away.

Beyond the strictly technical, working in a sixty person team can make coordination a challenge. Managing data on the weight, geometry, and materials used across over 300 components in a constantly evolving assembly is a daunting task that relies on effective communication between everyone involved. To make sure we’re always on the same page, we prepare internal presentations to report on parameters and outcomes so we can act on suggestions.

The limitations of the global model can’t be avoided, so we’ve kept them in mind while interpreting the results. Stress plots have helped us to check Vulcan for weak points that we can iteratively improve, but they’re only one tool among many.

And with the process now complete, we’re proud to say that we’ve come away from it feeling confident and reassured!

Sturdy connections between the wing and the booms — key components of a twin-boom aircraft — are absolutely vital for a ...
13/03/2023

Sturdy connections between the wing and the booms — key components of a twin-boom aircraft — are absolutely vital for a UAV’s flight readiness. Vulcan’s wing-boom attachment ribs were analysed by Adam Dunn, who joined the Hex team this year with valuable FEA experience gained from his year in industry.

FEA software can approximate the stresses and deformation of a model by breaking it down into small elements and nodes using a mesh. But the range of assumptions, limitations, and simplifications to consider are what make it so complex to get right.

The first key simplification is in the geometry. In this case, the only components relevant to the analysis are the ribs, spars, boom, and boom mounting blocks. By applying pitch and yaw forces to the boom, we’ve been analysing the stresses on the ribs under expected conditions and a high loading worst-case scenario to figure out where the weak points are and how they’ll hold up. Our objectives so far have focused on material selection (should we use aluminium or carbon fibre?) and the bolted connections: will they withstand their loads?

Although we’ve found that both materials would have very low stresses in expected conditions and acceptable stresses even through the worst, we’re opting for carbon fibre to take advantage of its lower weight and higher factor of safety in worst-case conditions. To save even more weight, we’ll soon be analysing a series of optimised rib variants using a combination of finite element methods and real-world testing. Look out for a follow-up detailing our final selection!

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The University Of Sheffield, 32 Leavygreave Road, Broomhall
Sheffield
S37RD

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