Vulnerability assessment of combat aircraft to blast loading

Blast wave is a non-negligible killing mechanism for aircraft vulnerability assessment because of its destructive damaging effort in short distance encounter. The existing kill criteria for blast wave damage are mostly obtained from practical and numerical experiments, which are time-consuming and costing. This paper presents a more efficient way to get kill criterion by modeling and assessing the structure vibration of aircraft components with the simplified elastic plastic method, and developing the force model in plastic stage under blast wave. First the complex aircraft is modeled by a combination of flat, beam, arched, and rectangular elements. Then the kill criteria are proposed by comparing the maximum displacement with the allowable deflection of the element in the whole elastic–plastic process. Two illustrative examples of aircraft are studied and tested under blast wave impact with LS-DYNA solver. The results of kill proportions and blast kill contours show that the proposed method is feasible a...