Session: 01-01-01: General Topics of Aerospace Structures 1

Paper Number: 151852

151852 - Design Optimization of an Aircraft Composite Panel Against Bird Strike 

The collision of aircraft and birds affects flight safety, causes financial losses and loss of lives. Aviation authorities such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published regulations to reduce the effects of accidents and ensure flight safety. According to crash reports and statistics, windshield, radome, engine, wings and empennage are the areas damaged by birds. FAA has reported a total of 222,753 bird ingestion accidents during the period of 1990–2018 [1]. To ensure that the aircraft structures are resistant to bird strikes, experimental tests are carried out on the aircraft structural parts most affected by the impact. The repetition of experimental testing, the reproduction of leading edge structure and development of designed parts are costly and time-consuming processes. Due to their low computational cost and high accuracy, numerical simulations (e.g., finite element analyses) are used to analyze bird strike problem.

The collision of aircraft and birds affects flight safety, causes financial losses and loss of lives. Aviation authorities such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) published regulations to reduce the effects of accidents and ensure flight safety. According to crash reports and statistics, windshield, radome, engine, wings and empennage are the areas damaged by birds. FAA has reported a total of 276,846 bird ingestion accidents during the period of 1990–2022 [1]. To ensure that the aircraft structures are resistant to bird strikes, experimental tests are carried out on the aircraft structural parts most affected by the impact. The repetition of experimental testing, the reproduction of leading edge structure and development of designed parts are costly and time-consuming processes. Due to their low computational cost and high accuracy, numerical simulations (e.g., finite element analyses) are used to analyze bird strike problem.

In this paper, design optimization of an aircraft composite panel is performed against bird strike. The carbon fiber composite panel is designed following the standards of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA CS-25 certification standard) and the practices of Turkish Aerospace Industries. The impact problem is simulated with finite element method using LS-DYNA software. The constructed finite element model is validated by using the experimental results conducted at testing facilities of Roketsan Missile Industries as well as experimental data available in literature [2]. After the finite element model is validated, design optimization of the aircraft composite panel is performed. We found that the panel weight can be significantly reduced without jeopardizing the safety.

REFERENCES

[1]          Dolbeer, R. A., Begier, M. J., Miller, P. R., Weller, J. R., & Anderson, A. L. (2023). Wildlife strikes to civil aircraft in the United States, 1990–2022. United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration. William J. Hughes Technical Center.

[2]          Zhang, Y., Zhou, Y., & Sun, Y. (2022). Bird-strike damage analysis of composite panels with different stiffeners. Aircraft engineering and aerospace technology, 94(6), 933-947.

Presenting Author: Erdem Acar TOBB University of Economics and Technology

Presenting Author Biography: Erdem Acar received his BS and MS degrees in Aerospace Engineering at the Middle East Technical University in 1999 and 2002, respectively, and his PhD degree in the same field at the University of Florida in 2006. He served as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems of the Mississippi State University from 2006 to 2008. He began his academic career in 2008 at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology of Turkey, where he is currently a full time professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is actively engaged in teaching and research. His primary areas of teaching include structural analysis and reliability assessment of mechanical systems. His research experiences encompass aerospace vehicle design, aerospace structures, design of transparent structures in aircraft (e.g., canopy), design of armored composite structures for aircraft, design of composite battery enclosure for electric vehicles, design of structures against impact (e.g., bird strike, ballistic impact, crash, explosion), structural and multidisciplinary optimization of engineering systems including aircraft, automobiles and their complex parts, surrogate modeling and machine learning, design under uncertainty, and reliability-based design optimization. He has published over hundred refereed journal and conference papers in the above areas. He is a review editor for the Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization journal, and editorial board member of the International Journal of Crashworthiness. He is an associate fellow of AIAA, and served a member of the AIAA Non Deterministic Approaches Technical Committee between 2013 and 2017. He has been acting as the co-chair of NATO AVT-384 RSM on "Novel Materials and Manufacturing in Military Vehicle Design."