Determining the effect of bird parameters on bird strikes to commercial passenger aircraft using the central composite design method

Abstract

Today, bird strike is one of the most threatening problems to flight safety. A bird strike damage in flight can result in serious structural damage or even fatal accidents. A bird strike model requires high computational power for model preparation and nonlinear explicit analysis because of composite materials, contact definitions and other complex analysis parameters. Investigating the effects of design parameters on bird strike is a costly and time-consuming practice. The influence of various parameters such as bird velocity and impact angle has been also evaluated on a composite target in this research. Investigation of the effects of bird parameters on a composite target provides a clearer definition of the strength limits and energy transfer of composite materials exposed to bird strikes. Real bird strike tests are in good agreement with Ls-Dyna analysis results in this study. The unique aspect of this research is that the Central Composite Design (CCD) method, one of the Design of Experiment (DOE) methods, is one of the first applications in the bird strike problem. Bird strike simulations were performed in different analysis parameters based on the Central Composite Design (CCD) method and the effects of the parameters on bird strike were found with the regression equations obtained from Minitab.