Detailed FE aircraft fuselage sections for water impact simulations in the pre-design process chain

Abstract

Crashworthiness considerations are mandatory in the certification process of aircraft to ensure the safety of all occupants in any situation like in the eventual case of an emergency landing on water. The structural investigation of the airframe to sufficiently withstand hydrodynamic loadings caused during water impact and the subsequent landing is part of the certification requirements. Computer-aided tools using numerical representations of the aircraft structure with the Finite Element (FE) method are currently considered in a multidisciplinary environment to predict and analyse the structural behaviour in early design phases. Highly detailed full-models that can sufficiently describe structural deformations are challenged by its computational effort, resulting in simplifications to representative fuselage sections also in combination with simpler element models. The presented work demonstrates the newly integrated capabilities of the framework PANDORA for the automatic pre-processing of detailed structural FE models of fuselage sections with different discretization approaches for water impact simulations.