Abstract

Greening the air traffic is a very challenging task for the engineers. The economic requirements, the overall energy consumption throughout the whole life cycle and the safety standard should at least stay constant or be improved. Different new technologies are therefore developed within the European Clean Sky II Program. The development of simulation methodologies for the assessment of the impact behavior of new materials against potential threads is one of them. In a first step, two reference materials (the aluminum Al2024T3 and the UD T700/M21) as well as two promising shielding materials (the tri-axially braided AS4c carbon fiber reinforced M36 epoxy and the tri-axially braided Zylon fiber reinforced CYCOM 890 epoxy) were selected as materials for the investigations. Material characterization test results were employed to determine the parameters of appropriate material cards within the commercial simulation software Abaqus® Explicit. In a third step, high velocity impact test campaigns were performed for each material to assess their impact performances. A steel ball, a long composite projectile, and a generic debris were chosen to create a test matrix. The simulation methodology was validated for different target materials with selected high velocity impact test results. The influence of the mesh size on the quality of the simulation results as well as on the simulation time was investigated. Considering those results, suitable meshes and material card parameters were chosen within the validated simulation results to assess the impact behavior for two generic high velocity impact cases: a very small steel debris (from an auxiliary power unit) impacting a flat target and a blade of an open rotor impacting a fuselage skin component. The investigations show so far that a large number of effects take place in impact events with the considered threads and that simulations are unavoidable in the selection of appropriate shielding solutions.