Abstract
The improvement of engines is one of the ways to diminish the fuel consumption in civil aircrafts, and Open Rotors engines are one of the best promises in order to achieve a sensible efficiency increment. These engines have large composite blades that could, in the event of failure, impact against the fuselage, totally or partially. In this case, composite fragments could behave as impactors. In order to design fuselages for this event and adopt these new engines in the future, it is necessary to understand the impact behaviour of a composite fragment against a deformable structure. To this end, unidirectional and woven composites fragments were impacted at high velocity (up to 150 m/s) against aluminium panels at different impact velocities. The composite fragments were made using AS4/8552 (UD) and AGP-193PW (woven) prepregs manufactured by Hexcel Composites, both using AS4 fibres and 8552 epoxy matrix. High speed video cameras were used to record the impact process and to measure both the impact and the residual velocity and hence the energy absorbed.
Highlights
The aeronautic transport industry it is responsible of around 2% of all the greenhouse gasses emitted to the atmosphere
One of the most important advances conceived in last years is the open rotor engine, which promises around a 20% less fuel consume
This new engine consists on a series of large composite blades acting as propellers; in case of failure these blades could impact the fuselage since these engines doesn’t have an structural case
Summary
The aeronautic transport industry it is responsible of around 2% of all the greenhouse gasses emitted to the atmosphere. One of the main issues that aircraft manufacturers have to solve in order to incorporate these new engines, is to assure the structural integrity in case of a failure. This is probably the reason why it is not easy to find articles regarding the behaviour of composite fragments against lightweight structures (typically aluminium or carbon/epoxy laminate plates)
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