Investigation of aerodynamic structure of aircraft wings damaged by bird strikes

Bird Strike is common and can be a significant threat to aircraft safety. Mainly due to the high costs involved in the certification process, design, and built of experiments the numerical procedures have been employed by many engineers and scientists. There have been significant number of studies on the different airfoil structures. However, there are limited studies on the effect of the damaged airfoil structures considering deformed by bird strikes. In this study, a simplified parametric approach is introduced to model the damaged wing profile presumably caused by bird strike for computational fluid dynamics analyses. This study is aimed to address the change in the aerodynamic performance of aircraft wings after bird strikes. The geometry and mesh structure of the damaged airfoils are modeled by creating artificial circular dents on NACA4412 airfoils and analyzed in ANSYS Fluent solver. This study presents drag and lift coefficient of damaged wing profiles available from numerical solver. All the results are compared with the undamaged airfoils and comments on the change of the aerodynamic properties of the airfoil profiles. This study has shown that the drag coefficient in the NACA4412 airfoil increased in damaged airfoils. As a result of the increased drag coefficient, it was observed that the pressure distribution on the wings deteriorated. This study has raised important questions about the nature of the change in the pressure affecting lift coefficient due the alterations in the NACA4412 airfoil.