SPH-FEM Design of Laminated Plies under Bird-Strike Impact

Yadong Zhou,Tianlin Huang,Youchao Sun

doi:10.3390/aerospace6100112

Abstract

Composite laminates can potentially reduce the weight of aircrafts; however, they are subjected to bird strike hazards in civil aviation. To handle their nonlinear dynamic behaviour, in this study, the impact damage of composite laminates were numerically evaluated and designed by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the interaction between bird projectiles and the laminates. Attention was mainly focused on the different damage modes in various laminates’ plies induced by bird impact on a square laminated plate. A continuum damage mechanics approach was exploited to simulate damage initiation and evolution in composite laminates. Damage maps were computed with respect to different ply angles, i.e., 0°, 45° and −45°. The damage distributions were comparatively investigated, and then the ply design was considered for crashworthiness improvement. The results aim to serve as a design guideline for future prototype-scale bird strike studies of complex laminated structures.

Highlights

As an important soft-body impact, structural damage induced by bird strike has become an increasingly serious and catastrophic issue in the civil aviation industry [1,2], threatening the safety of aircraft and passengers, e.g., loss of aircrafts and even the loss of lives
Composite laminates undergo complex internal damage when they are subjected to foreign object damage (FOD) via impacts
With much more complexity compared to metal materials, several failure modes in composite materials can be caused by impact loading, such as fiber fracture, matrix cracking, delamination, etc

Summary

Introduction

As an important soft-body impact, structural damage induced by bird strike has become an increasingly serious and catastrophic issue in the civil aviation industry [1,2], threatening the safety of aircraft and passengers, e.g., loss of aircrafts and even the loss of lives. Under the bird soft-body impacts, some critical parameters, e.g., geometry effects of birds [4,5,6,7], material’s models of birds [8,9,10], initial velocities and impact angles of the bird projectile [10,11,12,13], etc., can influence the deformations and damage mechanisms of the front-facing structures Due to their fine mechanical properties, composite laminates are used as key materials for aircraft’s front-facing components, e.g., the fan blades of aeroengine structures. For the damage and failure modes of composite materials upon FOD, influential factors mainly include structural geometries [15,19], impact velocity/locations [20,21,22], properties of the projectile [20], layer configurations [17,19,23,24], fiber and matrix properties [25], etc

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Conclusion