Structural and CFD analysis of an airfoil subjected to bird strike

Abstract

The bird strike incident is a hazard that affects the structural integrity of the aircraft. Bird strikes cause a surge on the wing profile affecting the aerodynamic performances and flight safety of the aircraft. Flight authorities enforce the manufacturers to perform numerous tests before the aircraft are available in the aviation market. Numerical studies and bird strike simulations have become an essential part of aircraft components design to avoid frequent costly tests. The bird strike incidents have been widely studied by numerous researchers as numerically, although only a few considered the effect of bird strike deformation on flow and aerodynamic conditions of an aircraft component. Therefore, this paper aims to present a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis for the aerodynamic behavior of a damaged wing due to a bird strike. To obtain a deformed wing profile for the CFD analysis, the bird strike analysis is performed using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for the bird model. Then the deformed airfoil geometry is imported to the CFD solver to obtain the lift, drag, and moment coefficients. The drag coefficient of the deformed wing profile increases due to the pressure distribution disruption of the deformed airfoil. The lift coefficient is also affected by the bird strike but varies with changing angles of attack (α). Similarly, the deformed wing profile delivers an impaired coefficient of the moment for smaller angles of attack, reaching a negative value.