INVESTIGATION OF EFFECTS OF BIRD STRIKE ON WING LEADING EDGE BY USING EXPLICIT FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Oguzhan Dede and Altan Kayran

In aviation industry, bird strike problem causes structural damage and threats to flight safety. Nowadays, designed and produced aircraft have to satisfy safe flight and landing requirements. The behavior of the aircraft components during bird strike have to be investigated by numerical methods or experiments. Results obtained from numerical analysis and /or experiments have to be carefully studied to optimize the aircraft structures. The main aim of this study is to apply the explicit finite element analysis procedure for the analysis of bird strike problem on the leading edge of the wing. In addition, another aim of this study is to show capabilities and effectiveness of honeycomb material against bird strike when used in the leading edge. For this purpose, LSTC Ls-Dyna is chosen as the explicit finite element solver for the bird strike analysis. To model the soft body impactor (bird), a small benchmark study is performed among different solution formulations such as Eulerian, ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian) and SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics). Similarly, suitable material model is selected to model the metallic aircraft structure by conducting a benchmark study between elasto-plastic and elasto-viscoplastic material models. Johnson Cook material model is decided to be used for modeling of metallic aircraft structures. Additionally, laminated composite fabric material model which is available in Ls-Dyna material model library is used for modeling the composite wing leading edge. Material characterization test results are used to determine material parameters and coupon simulations are performed to validate material model of the composite fabric material. After the selection of suitable solution formulation for soft body impactor and material models for metallic and composite aircraft structure, bird strike analyses on the wing leading edge are performed for both metallic and composite case studies. Effect of bird strike is investigated for metallic and composite leading edges and it is clearly seen that bird strike problem may lead to catastrophic failure during flight if proper design measures are not taken.

Fulltext (PDF)