A landing that exceeds design conditions is usually referred to as a hard or harsh landing. This condition is delimited between the usual operational conditions and the crash event. Helicopter structural damage due to harsh landings is generally not as severe as during a crash, but it may lead to unscheduled maintenance events, involving costs and idle time. The aim of the current paper is to define a methodology, which estimates (by means of hybrid, multi-environment analyses) the damage state of a part of a helicopter fuselage after a harsh landing event. In particular, a mixed multibody finite element modeling strategy is used to achieve computationally efficient results, which are obtained for various landing conditions, in terms of drop heights and the helicopter attitude at landing. The obtained model may be useful both in a design scenario and in exploring structural health monitoring applications. With the latter in mind, output data were deeply investigated with a dedicated focus on the correlation between the damage position and landing conditions. Stringers in a particular zone of the fuselage were identified as the most affected zone (by localized plasticization) during harsh landings. This result provides a possible basis for using focused structural health monitoring strategies. With this in mind, a zone selection criterion, as a tradeoff between sensorization extension and performance, was proposed.
Helicopter Harsh Landing Events: A Computational Hybrid Methodology to Estimate Fuselage Damage
Journal of Aircraft ; 50 , 6 ; 1896-1907
2013-11-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Helicopter Harsh Landing Events: A Computational Hybrid Methodology to Estimate Fuselage Damage
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