Development of an efficient numerical model for hail impact simulation based on experimental data obtained from pressure sensitive film

Aircraft are subjects to a number of unpredictable loadings that can seriously affect their performance. In the spirit of ever increasing the safety of passengers, hail impact has been studied. This paper shows the progress that has been made using pressure sensitive film to measure the hail impact event. Moreover, the smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method in LS-DYNA is used to create a numerical model in order to validate the numerical hail model so that it can be used in future advanced simulations of hail impact on components of aircraft. Results show that the SPH method can be effectively used to create a numerical hail model and that pressure sensitive film is a simple and inexpensive tool to capture the experimental data. Crown Copyright (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.