Durability evaluation of the airlift provision for Korean light tactical vehicles based on fatigue test modes

Abstract

The dynamic stability and structural safety of a tactical vehicle in tactical airlift, contrary to that on the ground, may be drastically reduced due to various flight situations. Airlift provisions that connect a helicopter and a tactical vehicle should be designed to ensure the abovementioned attributes of the vehicle. Moreover, the hard points of the airlift provision should be selected to enable a stable flight. The airlift device should be designed to withstand the ultimate loads in air transportation. A proprietary test standard comparable to the US military standard MIL-STD-209K is crucial for such a design. However, car manufacturers cannot develop a test specification for airlifting. Therefore, a design methodology for developing an airlift system is required, and computational analysis techniques should be developed to simulate tactical airlift situations. A computer-aided engineering approach to verifying the durability of the airlift provision for Korean light tactical vehicles is presented. Static fatigue analyses, according to the US military test modes, are performed to examine the durability of the airlift system. The contribution of fatigue life to fatigue test modes is evaluated, and an effective fatigue loading mode, namely, K mode, is proposed based on these results. We also compared the durability performance of the lightweight model derived from an approximate optimization and that of the base model.