Ballistic gelatin Lagrange Mooney-Rivlin material model as a substitute of bird in finite element bird strike case studies

Abstract

Numerical simulation plays a crucial role in today’s aviation industry. Modern computers with the latest commercial FE codes have fueled the triumph of establishing simulation as a prerequisite of aerostructure part design from micro modeling of materials to large-scale structural analysis. In this current research paper, a Mooney-Rivlin material model of ballistic gelatin with Lagrange code is analyzed as a potential candidate for the computational bird model to simulate bird strike case studies. To investigate the practicability, the model is compared with other established Lagrange and SPH EOS models for both rigid and deformable body impacts along with experimental data found in the literature adopting explicit solver Ansys Autodyn. Despite some discrepancies found during rigid body impacts, deformable plate impacts confirm the robustness of the model with significantly faster computation time. Besides, the biggest criticism of the Lagrange model, mesh distortion problem as fluid during bird strike case studies is efficiently tackled by adopting the node erosion algorithm as an effective technique to solve Lagrange bird models without affecting the outcome of the solutions.

Keywords:
Ballistic gelatin; Mooney-Rivlin material model; Lagrange bird model; SPH; EOS; Node erosion; Autodyn

Graphical Abstract