Crashworthiness of wing leading edges under bird impact event

The work aims to investigate the capability of a vertical tail leading edge to withstand bird strike and to provide general considerations on the improvement of such capability with respect to the mass saving and to the required structural performances by considering different material systems. The assessment of the numerical models was ensured by a double check, and therefore considering the two test cases, aimed to calibrate and validate the numerical models against experimental data, coming from literature: 1) bird strike on metallic flat square plate; 2) bird strike on wing leading-edge with the skin made in metallic sandwich structure (both the honeycomb core and the outer and inner face was in aluminum). Finally, the crashworthy design of several leading-edge configurations, modifying the material and thickness of the skins and the central core of the leading edge, without changing its external geometrical shape, was investigated by adopting the numerical procedures used for the validation test cases. Actually, unidirectional fiber-reinforced composite material systems were considered for the outer and inner face of the skins, while different materials were adopted for the core. A comparison among the developed configurations, in terms of requirement fulfillment, global deformation parameters and weight, was performed.