Drone strike on a helicopter canopy demonstrator

Abstract

The evaluation of structures under impact where large-scale projectiles like birds or drones are involved needs analyses at full-scale. The reason is that size effects can yet not be scaled from smaller samples. Hence, a canopy demonstrator with representative dimensions of a medium sized helicopter was developed. The two objectives for the demonstrator were the design development of a purely bonded windshield concept and the sizing of the windshield. For the windshield, polycarbonate (PC) was used while the carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) composite frame was adhesively bond by polyurethane. The experimental results of bird impact tests at different temperatures were used to validate the modelling and simulation approach for the final component design in the real 3d design. For the drone strike analysis, drone configurations and sizes were analysed. The work was then focused on the widely applied quadcopter configuration. Several steps were taken to validate the material and structural behaviour of the selected drone. With the generated quadcopter model, several loading conditions on a fast compound helicopter were modelled and the impact of the drone was applied. For the first experiment of a quadcopter drone strike on a plastics windshield a critical impact load case was selected. To further improve modelling and simulation, there was applied a path for the correlation by means of an instrumentation by force measurement.