Numerical simulation of crash impact test for fuel cell group of rotorcraft

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Abstract
Crashworthy fuel cell has been widely applied to rotorcraft for improving the survivability of crews. Because the aircraft fuel cell has many interfaces connected to the airframe, it has been considered as one of the system-dependent critical components. Since the embryonic stage of military rotorcraft history began, US army has developed the detailed military specification document required to perform the crash impact test to make sure of the crashworthiness of fuel cells. However, the crash impact test of the fuel cell requests high cost and spending a lot of time to manufacture fuel cells. Moreover, there is a big risk of failure due to huge amount of crash impact load. Then, at the early design stage, the numerical simulation was needed to reduce the possibility of failure before performing the crash impact test. The present study reports on numerical simulations that use a smoothed particle hydrodynamics method supported by crash simulation commercial software (LS-DYNA). The test conditions of MIL-DTL-27422 are employed for the numerical analysis and the material information of the fuel cell is obtained from the specimen test. The resulting equivalent stresses of the fuel cell are calculated and the vulnerable areas are also evaluated. Moreover, the improved design is reconsidered to reduce the maximum stress value of the fuel cell and future work is mentioned to validate the result of the numerical analysis.

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