22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-4.11.3

IMPROVEMENT OF CRASH MODELS OF LARGE AERONAUTICAL STRUCTURES

B. Malherbe, B. Langrand, J. L. Charles, J. F. Sobry
ONERA, France

Keywords: crash, aeronautical structures, modeling methods, riveted joints

The paper presents different new methodological developments in the field of the crash simulations of large aeronautical structures using explicit F.E. codes, such as RADIOSS. The main technical difficulties arise from the dimensions and the complexity of the structures to model (up to a complete aircraft) on the one hand, and from the complexity of the very local ruin phenomena (rupture of material or failure of riveted joints) on the other hand. Two ways of improvement have been studied by ONERA in the frame of a DGA/SPAé French research program, and are presented in the paper. The first one deals with the development of simplified but realistic modelling methods, the main objective of which is to reduce the developing and the computing costs comparatively to a classical way. The second one studies the dynamic behaviour of the riveted joints (experimentally and numerically), in order to improve their modelling in the crash models. The paper describes experimental characterisation techniques, for a single rivet (a new ARCAN test have been developed) then for a joint, and their exploitation to determine the parameters of numerical models. In application, a crash model of the complete Airbus A320 have been built up by ONERA and Aerospatiale-Matra Airbus, making the simulation of different crash scenarios possible and realistic enough.

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