Comprehensive soft impact damage methodology for advanced high bypass ratio turbofan engines

Foreign object strikes are one of the major aviation incidents that cause tremendous risk to both the aircraft and passengers, the adverse implications of which can ripple through the aviation industry. The demand for air transportation has been on the rise, leading to foreign object ingestion into the engines becoming one of the most threatening scenarios. In January 2009, Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City and struck a flock of Canadian Geese during takeoff. Both engines ingested birds, resulting in mid-air catastrophic engine failure. Fortunately, none of the damaged engine components penetrated into the cabin and the aircraft successfully completed an emergency landing on the Hudson River without incurring any casualties. In this work, explicit finite element strategies have been adopted to model the Fluid-Solid Interactions (FSI) present in a bird ingestion scenario. Taking into account the fluidic composition of bird bodies, a proper methodology to model the Fluid-Solid Interaction was implemented. The investigations were aimed to understand the significance of impact force histograms in an accurately represented model, analyze shockwave propagations and reflections during the impact window, and perform parametric studies to highlight a superior representation for the Fluid-Solid Interaction (FSI). The paper presents a modern explicit finite element methodology adopted to accurately model bird ingestion into a complex turbomachinery forward section and analyze subsequent failure sequencing of the relevant structural components within the system.