The Army Research Laboratory has awarded Blake Stringer, Ph.D., assistant professor of aerospace engineering in Kent State’s College of Aeronautics and Engineering, a grant worth more than $130,000 to study propulsion systems for a new generation of intermediate-sized UAS.

Currently, the military is limited to airplanes and helicopters when it needs to move people and supplies through the air.

With this in mind, Dr. Stringer, who retired after 20 years in the Army, will work with Army Research Laboratory consultants and researchers at the University of Tennessee to see how plausible it is to create a UAS that is somewhere in between the size of the military's current aviation options.

“We’re taking something between zero and 55 pounds, and trying to make it 1,000 pounds,” Dr. Stringer says. “We want to make it so it’s able to drop supplies off or perform some mission.”

The UAS needs to be capable of handling a variety of tasks, including extracting soldiers from a top floor on a high-rise building, or sending supplies to a more remote area.

According to Dr. Stringer, one of the main challenges in designing an aircraft like this is making sure that it meets the power requirements.

“How do we efficiently produce power that’s not around a gas turbine or a piston engine?” Dr. Stringer says.

“Is it going to be some kind of hybrid propulsion system? Will you have a fuel cell that feeds into a battery and uses the battery for surge moments? There are a lot of different questions.”

Dr. Stringer says that the grant is for a one-year project, but he hopes the research will be successful enough to take the group project to a second phase of support by the Army.