International Journal of Aerospace and Lightweight Structures

doi: 10.3850/S2010428612000463

An Up-Limit Approach for Evaluating the
Bird-Strike Behavior of Helicopter Structures

C. L. Xu^a, X. Zhang, Z. Y. Xiao, H. Liu and J. L. Yang^b The Solid Mechanics Research Center, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China. ^achaoliangxu@163.com ^bJLYang@buaa.edu.cn

ABSTRACT

An up-limit approach by analyzing several kinds of contact force-time histories exerted on the contact area from bird striking is proposed in this paper. The proposed up-limit approach demonstrates a kind of “dangerous” shape of pulse loads which result in the maximum deflection of a typical helicopter front fuselage when the momentum of the bird input to the structure is specified. The newly-proposed approach, which is unnecessary to consider the contact force between the bird and the target object, can provide a convenient way of evaluating bird striking failure behavior of structures conservatively. By utilizing the up-limit approach to evaluate the bird strike resistance of the civil helicopter front fuselage, it is found that compared with those of the SPH method, the maximum displacement and stress predicted by the up-limit approach are acceptable, and the errors are less than 6% and 18%, respectively.

Keywords: Bird impact, Experimental research, SPH method, Up-limit approach.

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