Verification and application of bird strike analysis for the design of high-speed helicopter composite cowlings

Abstract

Bird strikes are an important phenomenon that must be taken into consideration when designing aircraft. A bird impact experiment provides a direct method to examine the bird strike resistance. However, the design of the aircraft structures usually involves many iterations of design-manufacturing-test and conducting bird impact experiments is not only time consuming but also costly. The aim of this work is to show the application of test verified numerical simulation for the design of composite cowlings of the high-speed helicopter.