INFLUENCE OF A BIRD MODEL SHAPE ON THE BIRD IMPACT PARAMETERS

Abstract

One of the factors which significantly exert a negative influence on flight safety is a collision of an aircraft with birds. Various parts of an aircraft are subjected to damage. Within the conducted analyses, the impact loaded object was a helicopter windshield. Apart from the mandatory physical tests, there are various numerical methods for bird strike modeling. Among them, in this paper, the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is being used and developed for bird modeling. Investigations exploit various geometric figures in order to model the bird shape. Few authors present research findings which employ an approximate shape of certain bird species. For comparison three bird models were elaborated upon, one in the shape of a cylinder with hemispherical ends (homogeneous model) and two others as multi-material models, one in the shape of a simplified white stork and the other one close to the real-life white stork. Multi-material bird models had various parameters. It must be noted that the maximum value of the resultant windshield displacement varies for different bird models. The bird model close to the real-life white stork caused the smallest deflection, while the bird model in the shape of a simplified white stork and the homogeneous bird model led to the biggest damage, respectively. It is important to add that the models are of the same mass, impact velocity and a different size. This has an impact on the kinetic energy distribution during the collision process, which results in different windshield bending values.