Crash simulation and drop test of civil airplane fuselage section

To study the crashworthiness of a civil airplane fuselage section under vertical crash condition, a finite element model of this fuselage section was developed, and numerical simulations of the fuselage section under 7 m/s vertical impact condition is performed using LS-DYNA explicit finite element code. Then a drop test of the structure is conducted, the impact surface was a wooden platform instrumented with 12 load cells. The passengers were simulated by 15 dummies, 4 of them were instrumented, and the passenger baggage was simulated by concentrated weights. The impact loads and the acceleration responses of the structure and dummies were collected by the data acquisition systems (DAS), and the DAS was synchronized to the high speed cameras. The experimental data processing methodologies were introduced and typical experimental curves were presented. The correlation of test and simulation shows that the simulation accurately captured the crushing and buckling pattern observed in the test article.