Development of a Crashworthy Subfloor Concept for a Commuter Aircraft

This paper presents a retrofit design of a subfloor structure for commuter aircrafts. The subfloor concept is developed to improve the crash safety and consists in adding to a conventional aluminum structure crushable elements made of foam-blocks. The finite element simulation of a 9 m/s vertical impact onto a rigid surface shows that the accelerations in correspondence of the seats and the occupants are limited to 22 g, in comparison to the 33 g of the original configuration. So, the maximum acceleration results 33% lower than the maximum one measured on the conventional subfloor. Also the floor buckling and the seat detachment are significantly reduced.