Aircraft structural components are exposed to foreign object damage (FOD) and bird strikes can be regarded as being a major source of FOD and has led to accidents which in turn have led to loss of human lives and financial losses to aircraft Therefore, certification authorities require a certain level of impact resistance from specific vulnerable aircraft structural components. While the traditional approach to design such components has been through rigorous testing, which is time consuming and expensive. Here the focus of the current study is on the further numerical modeling and simulation of high velocity impacts from soft body projectiles on metal and composite structures by using explicit FEA codes. This article presents finite element (FE) simulations of bird strike event on the Al-2024-T3 flat panels. Various aspects related to material modeling for the bird, which is characterized as a soft body, the formulation techniques and the meshing schemes are assessed in this article. The results of FE simulations are presented at different velocities. The effect on deformations due to change in boundary conditions is also presented. Finally, the results obtained from simulations are compared with the results obtained from high velocity impact test.

Keywords: Bird strike, High velocity impacts, Finite element simulations.