Preliminary Design:

Configuration:

The configuration for AMAT’s DBF’25 empennage will be traditional staggered, with the horizontal stabilizer mounted directly on the boom some distance forward of the vertical stabilizer. The traditional control layout of the tail provides familiar flight characteristics to the pilot while ensuring ease of construction and testing of control surfaces; the stagger decouples the horizontal and vertical stabilizers and allows them to be manufactured separately, providing a simpler manufacturing process when working w/ composite materials.

Construction:

The empennage of AMAT’s AIAA DBF 2025 entree will EITHER BE:

• Constructed out of composite surfaces strengthened by a spar cap/shear web design. This design will allow the tail of the aircraft to be as light as possible while still retaining the structural integrity required in flight, thus lowering the MTOW and requiring less structural reinforcement across the tail boom. The materials used in composite manufacture are planned to be:

Carbon Fiber, for fabric reinforcement

Aeroepoxy Resin, for binding

Balsa Wood, for coring material

Carbon Fiber Tow, for spar cap

Formular NGX XPS Foam, for shear web material

Kevlar, for control surface hinge

Manufacturing Plan:

The composite surfaces will be constructed using molded composite techniques. Specific molds will be designed using CAD and constructed with either additive manufacturing (using PETG) or other, more advanced methods (if time allows). The composite materials will then be laid in the mold along with binding resins to produce a composite part. Vacuum-based resin-infusion methods are planned, due to the higher reproducibility: however, team members are more familiar with traditional wet-layup methods as well as vacuum + wet layup, so those processes may be used if resin-infusion setups are determined to be too involved.