Project Areas

Aircraft

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Crashworthiness Of Aircraft For High Velocity Impact (CRAHVI) Project

A high proportion of passenger injuries and fatalities in high velocity impacts are caused by fire as a result of fuel tank rupture. Therefore reduction in the incidence of such events due to enhanced design of aircraft structures poses major challenges to manufacturers. The main objective of the EEC-backed CRAHVI project, in which CIC is a participant, is to develop the tools and methods to predict aircraft structure behaviour when subjected to high velocity impacts.

Impactor Models
CIC have developed Impactor models for hard (engine) debris, and obstacles at airport such as lamp posts. These were used to model impacts on a simple wing with skinned panels. This required generation of an environment to simulate impact scenarios for both impacting and impacted surfaces.

Several cases were investigated. The modelling approach and configurations, and the impact dynamics of the obstacles, were considered, selected and applied. The simulations used both rigid and elastic impactor material models, where the effect of strain rate could not be considered; this was addressed in a separate simulation.

The FE models  will be used for validation against high velocity impact data.