Intelligent Optimal Design Methods For Structural Safety

Abstract

Today s Aerospace Industries are required to address the improvements, innovations/value additions, keeping a better performance as major thrust, exploiting innovative methods with present trends in IT simulations. The major challenges could be dealing with structural integrity, fatigue, damage tolerant assessment, impact, and corrosions etc. In fact, solutions to these challenges by health monitoring technique, use of able approach for the prediction of life of a structural component with short term and long-term resolutions would be the requirements. newlineAn attempt has been made in this study to address the bird impact scenarios as per the regulatory requirements (FAR 23 and 25). Aircraft structural components are generally made of metals/laminated composite structural components, which are designed to carry both static and dynamic loads, namely aerodynamics and inertial forces. Besides the strength and buckling requirements, the dynamic response of the structural components plays a major role in the performance of airframe of an aircraft. In addition, during the impact/crash loadings, the dissipation of the imparted energy has got a significant influence on the extent of structural failure and stability of the aircraft. Generally, the structural components in the aircraft subjected to impact loads, are radome, windscreen, leading edges of wing, vertical tail and horizontal tail; sometimes fuselage. As the magnitude of impact loads especially on the critical component may lead to catastrophic failure due to damages, damage tolerant approach has been one of the adopted techniques at the time of design phase of the structural systems. This can be achieved by employing structural optimisation algorithms like gradient-based algorithms, genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks etc. The damage and its effect on the structural component can be assessed normally through experiments; however, this is the costly and time-consuming event. In the recent years, numerous attempts have been made to simulate impact/crash re