Verified fuselage section water impact modeling

Along many flight corridors, bodies of water serve as preferred emergency landing options, thus relevant scenarios must be investigated to improve aircraft crashworthiness in the event of impact landing on water. Enhancing the damage tolerance of aircraft structures through repetitive experiments can however prove highly uneconomical. Such large-scale trials can be influenced by many factors of uncertainty adversely affecting the quality of the results. Therefore, the work presented in this study focuses in particular on evaluating a computational methodology perfected for aircraft water ditching using Coupled Lagrangian-Eulerian (CLE) that allows detailed prediction of structural response of a fuselage section during such events. A validation of the fluid-structure interactive (FSI) strategy developed is conducted, thoroughly comparing the method against the analytical and experimental results of multiple wedge drop tests. Finally, the validated FSI methodology is applied to a high-fidelity fuselage section model impacting water to simulate and assess a realistic ditching scenario.