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2024
Conference Paper
Title
Vulnerability of aerostructures to drone impact - collision with rotorcraft engine cowling
Abstract
Due to the increasing availability of drones, collisions between privately piloted drones and aircraft are becoming increasingly probable. It is commonly accepted, that during a collision, drones pose a higher threat to the aircraft than birds of the same mass due to the higher strength and stiffness. This manuscript investigates collisions between drones and rotorcraft based on high-fidelity Finite Element simulations. For this purpose, a detailed simulation model of a battery pack, which is considered the most dangerous component for in collision scenarios, for a DJI MAVIC 2 Zoom drone (mass 2-lb) was developed for the explicit FE code LS-DYNA. The battery pack then virtually collided with the engine cowling of a high-speed rotorcraft. The predictions obtained from the high-fidelity finite element simulations indicate that the engine cowling suffers some amount of damage during the collision with the drone battery. However, for the collision scenarios investigated within this work, the battery did not penetrate the engine cowling.
Author(s)