UAV airborne collision to manned aircraft engine: Damage of fan blades and resultant thrust loss

Abstract

Recently, the growing amount of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought a huge threat to the safety management of manned aircraft operation, in which the UAV airborne collision is an incident that would lead to serious damage to the manned aircraft and will affect its operational safety significantly. In the present paper, the bird strike data over the year of 1990∼2019 is analyzed, which demonstrates that the engine is the most vulnerable component under bird strike, and the most severe hazard would happen during the flight phases of take-off, climb and approach. The dynamic response of UAV airborne collision with the manned aircraft engine is simulated based on the combination of FEM (Finite Element Method) and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations. Not only the damage of fan blades but also the thrust loss of the engine core caused by the damage in the compressor core is taken into account. The damage severity level of the engine under UAV airborne collision is studied by considering different collision configurations, different collision positions and different flight phases. Both the damage of fan blades and the percentage of thrust loss are considered to reflect the influence of UAV airborne collision on the aircraft operation. It is expected that this study can be used to guide the airborne safety assessment of UAV airborne collision.