1307 Advanced Numerical Simulation and Aircraft Crashworthiness

Julien Berthe, ONERA
Eric Deletombe, ONERA
 
Nowadays, aviation is one of the safest transportation modes. Aircraft safety is based on long-term built return on experience, technological innovations and a corpus of regulation rules dealing with material and operational aspects, all of them in constant evolution. In particular, the certification rules are deemed to increase the safety level. On an industrial point of view, the cost of certification procedure is in permanent growth under the certification pressure. In order to avoid expensive experimental analysis to prove design, increasing the confidence in crash numerical simulations of commercial aircraft is a research objective of the research community. Currently, numerical modelling of full aircraft crash situation is still a challenging problem. For example, the introduction of composite materials in primary aircraft structures leads to the need of new material laws to accurately describe the behaviour of these materials. Moreover in a crash simulation, a large number of highly nonlinear phenomena are involved which lead to complex numerical analysis. The objective of this symposium is to give an overview of the current developments in different research teams dealing with numerical aircraft crashworthiness.