Numerical model for a commercial aircraft water landing

Aircraft water impact crashworthiness must be considered for the aircraft used near or over the sea. The current crashworthiness criteria, design approaches and analysis methods have mainly focused on the ground impact conditions, without adequately accounting for fundamental differences associated with water crashes. This is because the crash dynamics in water impact condition is extremely complex with multi-physics interacting. To simplify the problem, an uncoupled method is proposed, using finite element simulation combined with corresponding experiments. A finite element model of reasonably simplified aircraft structure including the fuselage, wing and empennage is established by using MSC.PATRAN/MSC.DYTRAN code. The loading condition is transformed from the ditching test and thirteen dynamic load cases are considered in computation. Corresponding stress distributions for each case are predicted. It is shown that the strength of the skin on the bottom of fuselage will not be failed.