Investigation of bird strike effect on the composite wing structure of an unmanned aerial vehicle

Bird strike is an incident in which an aircraft is struck by birds and their derivatives. In addition to being among the most dangerous accidents in terms of flight safety, bird strike is an important issue for both civil aircraft and military aircraft. As a result of collisions between aircraft and birds, accidents with material and life loss can occur. In this context, necessary studies are carried out on the bird strike incident in order to minimize material loss and ensure life safety. In this thesis, the problem of bird strike to an unmanned aerial vehicle is addressed. Four different wing thicknesses (4 mm, 8 mm, 12 mm, 16 mm) have been analyzed to investigate the bird strike to an unmanned aerial vehicle. Firstly, the airfoil, bird geometry and their material properties were decided. Two different composite materials and two isotropic materials were studied as the wing material structure. In this context, NACA-2408 was preferred as the wing aerofoil section. The bird model has been representatively determined by geometric shapes. The bird model chosen for this problem is a cylinder with hemispherical tip, which gives the best results among the bird geometries commonly used in the literature. This bird model, which is considered to have hydrodynamic structural properties, is assumed to hit the center of the wing model and bird impact analyses are performed for three different velocity values (33 m/s, 37 m/s, 42 m/s). The analyses were simulated with ANSYS Workbench, a finite element method program, and the collision result data were obtained.