21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-4.3.1

NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERACTION IN AIRCRAFT FUEL TANKS SUBJECTED TO HYDRODYNAMIC RAM PENETRATION

Santini P., Palmieri D., Marchetti M.
University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy

Keywords: hydrodynamic ram, numerical simulation, fluid-structure interaction, aircraft fuel tanks

The impact of a fragment produced by an uncontained aircraft engine turbine failure against a fuel tank is numerically simulated with the AUTODYN-2D hydrocode. Axial symmetric shapes are considered for the fragment and the tank, because the use of the axial symmetry option makes the 2D simulations equivalent to 3D ones with a strongly reduced computation time. The tank walls loading by the pressure waves generated within the fluid (hydrodynamic ram) is taken into account, in order to understand if the pressure load can rupture the walls causing a large amount of fuel to flow out. Different numerical processors are coupled to simulate the different problem materials: a two dimensional lagrangian processor for the fragment, a thin shell lagrangian processor for the tank walls and an eulerian processor for the fuel. Wall failure is assumed to occur if the material effective plastic strain exceed a limit value.

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