Analysis and design for a bird-strike resistance sandwich structure

This paper provides a new design of a sandwich structure used in aircafts. To optimize this design, bird-strike tests are carried out on a sandwich structure made of a honeycomb core and aluminum cover plates, and a numerical model of this structure is developed with the explicit finite element program PAM-CRASH. The results of simulation, which describes the failure of the sandwich structure, agree well with test results. An improved structure is developed based on this result and bird-strike tests are carried out on the new structure. The reliability of the design is proved and the improved structure shows good behavior against bird-strikes in the tests.