Modelling strategies for numerical simulation of aircraft ditching

Bisagni, Chiara; Pigazzini, Marco Simone

doi:10.1080/13588265.2017.1328957

Cited by 23 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Various numerical results in the field of aircraft calm water-landing/ditching have been published through Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method [13][14][15][16][17], the messless Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method [15][16][17][18][19][20] and Finite Volume Method (FVM) [4,[21][22][23][24]. Early studies were mainly focused on the feasibility of the ALE and SPH approaches.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The well-approved point from Refs. [15][16][17] is that the ALE technique is an efficient formulation for both vertical impact and landing simulations, but difficult to accurately capture airwater-structure interface, the SPH method provides accurate results of ditching simulation due to free mesh strategy and high-resolution water spray but may suffers from huge computational cost. Recently, Xiao et al [18] developed an in-house SPH code and successfully applied it to predict calm water ditching process of capsule [19] and helicopter [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Numerical Study of Wave Effect on Aircraft Water-Landing Performance

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Aircraft, such as amphibious planes, airliners, helicopters and re-entry capsules, are frequently subject to impacting loads from water-landing/ditching on various free surfaces, especially under wave conditions. Understanding and quantifying the water-landing/ditching performance on wave surfaces are of fundamental important for the design and certification of crashworthiness in the field of aerospace engineering. This study aims to numerically assess the effect of wave surface on water-landing process of an amphibious aircraft. The numerical implementation is realized in Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) framework by combining finite volume method (FVM), volume of fluid (VOF) approach and velocity-inlet wavemaker. The temporal-spatial characteristic of numerical wave and the accuracy of presented model are, respectively, validated by analytical wave and convergence studies. The aircraft landing simulations with different free surface conditions, i.e., calm water, regular wave with different wave heights are then performed and quantitatively compared through several physical parameters, including acceleration, velocity, pressure, pitch angle and free surface deformation. It was found that the aircraft regular wave-landing process experiences several unique stages comparing with the calm-water-landing case. The results clearly confirm that wave surface can influence the aircraft landing performance to a great extent. The fundamental mechanism is found to be that the wave surface slope and wave particle velocity remarkably change the impacting position and effective impacting velocity of the aircraft.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical Study of Wave Effect on Aircraft Water-Landing Performance

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In [7] and [8] some problems related to helicopter ditching are examined. The use of computational approaches for the design and certification of aircraft at ditching is of course very attractive, and significant steps forward have been taken recently [9,10,11,12,13]. Nonetheless, a further enhancement of the capabilities of those tools to reproduce both the hydrodynamics and the strong fluid-structure interaction [34], where significant fluid-structure interaction aspects are highlighted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental investigation of the fluid-structure interaction during the water impact of thin aluminium plates at high horizontal speed

Spinosa

Iafrati

2021

International Journal of Impact Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The water impact of an inclined flat plate and at high horizontal velocity is experimentally investigated with focus on the fluid-structure interaction aspects. Several test conditions have been examined by varying the vertical to horizontal velocity ratio, the pitch angle and the plate thickness. Measurements are performed in terms of strains, loads and local pressure. The study highlights the significant changes in the strains and, more in general, in the structural behaviour when varying the plate stiffness and the test conditions. For some of the test presented, permanent deformation are also found. The strong fluid-structure interaction is analysed by comparing the simultaneous measurements of strains and pressures, and it is shown that the deformation of the plate leads to a reduction of the pressure peak and to a corresponding pressure rise behind it. The variation in the shape of the spray root caused by the structural deformation are discussed based on both pressure measurements and underwater images. Despite the reduction of the pressure peak intensity, it is shown that the structural deformation leads to an increase in the total loading up to 50% for the test conditions examined in this study. It is also observed that in presence of large structural deformations the hydrodynamic loads do not obey to the scaling that works in the case of the thick plates, and some practical conclusions about the scaling of tests in presence of a strong fluid-structure interaction are provided.

show abstract

“…The development of such methods is an active field of current research. Many publications focus on the simulation of ditching events at zero or low horizontal speed (see e.g., [4,10,11]). This condition is normally met during the ditching of helicopters for which results of full-scale experiments are available and are used to validate simulations [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges of Fully-Coupled High-Fidelity Ditching Simulations

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An important element of the process of aircraft certification is the demonstration of the crashworthiness of the structure in the event of an emergency landing on water, also referred to as ditching. Novel numerical simulation methods, that incorporate the interaction between fluid and structure, open up a promising way to model ditching in full scale. This study focuses on two main issues of high-fidelity ditching simulations: the development of a suitable fluid-structure coupling framework and the generation of the structural model of the aircraft. The first issue is addressed by implementing a partitioned coupling approach, which combines a finite volume hydrodynamic fluid solver as well as a finite element structural solver. The developed framework is validated by means of two ditching-like experiments, which consider the drop test of a rigid cylinder and a deformable cylindrical shell. The results of the validation studies indicate that an alternative to the standard Dirichlet-Neumann partitioning approach is needed if a strong added-mass effect is present. For the full-scale simulation of aircraft ditching, structural models become more complex and have to account for damage. Due to its high localization, the damage creates large differences in model scale and usually entails severe non-linearities in the model. To address the issue of increasing computational effort for such models, the process of developing a multi-scale model for the simulation of the failure of fuselage frames is presented.

show abstract

Modelling strategies for numerical simulation of aircraft ditching

Cited by 23 publications

References 20 publications

Numerical Study of Wave Effect on Aircraft Water-Landing Performance

Numerical Study of Wave Effect on Aircraft Water-Landing Performance

Experimental investigation of the fluid-structure interaction during the water impact of thin aluminium plates at high horizontal speed

Challenges of Fully-Coupled High-Fidelity Ditching Simulations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About