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High velocity impact of composite aircraft structures

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HICAS (High velocity Impact of Composite Aircraft Structures) is a basic research project concerned with the development of finite element (FE) simulation tools required by the aircraft industry for predicting high velocity (HV) impacts on composite structures. Emphasis has been on developing new materials failure models for composites, implementing these into commercial FE structural simulation codes, obtaining relevant materials property data from specimen tests, and validating the codes by simulating the impact response of idealised composite structures. The main technical achievements in the project are: - Improvements to test procedures for measuring the mechanical properties of composite materials under large strain, high strain rate loading; - Measurement of high strain rate mechanical properties of three aircraft composite materials. The materials selected were a toughened epoxy resin reinforced by unidirectional (UD) carbon fibres, carbon fabric and R-glass fabric, and are currently being used in Airbus and Eurofighter components; - Development of materials constitutive laws and failure models for these advanced UD and fabric composites under high velocity impact loading, typically up to 300m/s. New models have been proposed for in-plane damage development and for delamination failure in laminated composites; - Implementation of new constitutive laws and composites failure models into three commercial explicit FE impact and crash codes (PAM-CRASH, B2000 and DYNA-3D); - Validation of the FE code developments by simulating laboratory high velocity impact tests on idealised composite structures with hard and soft body impactors. The improved simulation techniques are urgently required by the European aircraft industry because of the increased usage of fibre reinforced composite materials in safety critical structures such as wings and aeroengines, where high velocity impacts from bird strike or foreign objects such as runway debris, burst tyres, etc. can pose a serious risk to aircraft safety. Validated simulation tools are essential for the industry to reduce development costs and to speed up the development cycle in order to keep up with international competitors, since impact tests on large aircraft structures are becoming too expensive to carry out at the development stage. Aircraft certification authorities such as the FAA and CAA also now recognise the future importance of reliable software tools for certifying aircraft structures. The main commercial benefit of the project is to develop a design methodology and FE simulation tools for predicting the response of composite aircraft structures to high velocity impacts from hard and soft body impactors. The scientific basis for improved FE structural codes has been developed in the project. These code improvements should soon become available to aircraft designers, once further work by the code developers to commercialise the improvements, improve stability, provide documentation, etc. has been completed.

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