Knowledge Bank

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have grown in popularity in recent years leading to an increased chance of a midair collision with a commercial aircraft. Soft body impacts with birds have been thoroughly studied for years, but this research cannot be applied to hard body impacts with a UAS due to the difference in composition. Recent research into hard body impacts have used models experimentally validated for low speed blunt impacts with the aircraft structure, but these models cannot be used for studies on engine ingestions due to the difference in impact conditions. This work will discuss the experiments and simulations designed to improve and validate the UAS model for high speed impacts for conditions seen in an engine ingestion. Physical tests were conducted to represent specific high speed ingestion scenarios which were then simulated in a high fidelity finite element tool LS-DYNA to validate the model. The data collected from the physical tests was able to be used with the simulations and the UAS model was successfully improved and validated for high speed slicing impacts. The next step for this research is to run engine ingestion simulations with the updated UAS model impacting a representative commercial sized fan blade model.