Simulating bird strikes using smoothed particle hydrodynamics for improved aircraft safety

Abstract

Impacts between birds and aircraft, referred to as bird strikes, are remarkably common and present a major issue with flight safety as a single incident can cause catastrophic damage. The Federal Aviation Administration requires that aircraft must withstand these impacts through testing using euthanized birds. This process is unethical, inefficient, costly and unreliable. Previous research has validated gelatin as a replacement material and hydrodynamic modeling as a computational approach. A great variation in results remains due to a lack of standardization in the experimental and computational testing methodologies. Authorities agree that a standard approach will better facilitate testing and reduce the threat that bird strikes pose. We hypothesized that further testing of gelatin substitutes and numerical approaches using advanced processing would facilitate impactful results and aid in introducing a new global bird strike testing standard. High-speed impacts on a Hopkinson bar and dynamic impacts using a pendulum serve to identify a valid setup and design that best represents impact behavior. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is used to create a numerical model representing the fluid nature of the collision. By performing various impacts through various techniques, we hypothesize that the numerical SPH model will validate the material behavior by yielding accurate force-time profiles. Implementing this model will allow for reliable prediction of material response and damage evolution following bird strike impacts.