Development and Validation of a SPH Bird Model in Abaqus/Explicit. Application to the Design of the AW609 Tiltrotor Structure

The present paper designs and validates a finite element bird model in order to develop a useful tool for the numerical simulation of an aeronautical bird strike event. The bird is simulated in Abaqus/Explicit environment using the Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. This formulation is a common approach to the problem, as noticed in many published works that investigate the bird strike problem using other solvers such as LS-Dyna. They are taken as a starting point of the present work in the definition of the bird model initial geometry and equation of state. A comparison and a correlation between some experimental tests and their simulations was conduct, in order to develop and validate the bird numerical model. In particular, impacts against rigid targets, such as plates and wedges, and against deformable ones are evaluated. The result is a validated SPH FE bird model, which can be involved in the next bird strike analysis being a reliable numerical tool.