Model helicopter crash simulation

700-size helicopter rotor blade collision with a rigid pole. This is a rough simulation with approximate material properties, mainly indented to be a demonstration run and to evaluate the upper and lower limits for collision reaction forces on a object, such as a human leg shimbone, that the blade accidentally runs into. In these demonstration runs, the shimbone is modelled as a rigid cylinder, resulting into conservative estimate for collision force (material failure would reduce peak load).

Worst case scenario would be a fully elastic material. In such a case, the peak force would be about 100 kN. When orthotropic elastic-plastic material model was used, the peak force is reduced to 40kN.

In reality, the blades are typically manufactured of carbon fibre laminate, that has brittle breakage and delamination failure modes. On the other hand, many such blades have longitudinal counterweight steel pins laminated inside blade's leading edge, providing ductility and resistance against blade breakage.

These analyses were run with Abaqus Standard 6.8-1 EF. With i7 -cores, both runs took about 24 hrs CPU time to run.

In the videos, the interval between frames is 30 microseconds.

Analysis model was created from 350 -size geometry model by scaling dimensions with a factor of 2.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• model
• helicopter
• crash
• simulation
• abaqus
• standard
• FEM
• FEA
• engineering
• analysis
• finite
• element
• method

[swaroop106]

woww...i appreciate the work!!

[mattbockman]

lol one of my lab mates (PhD program in ME) looked at my 450 and told me there's no way the carbon fiber blades could seriously injure you... lmao. I told him it's not a toy.