Challenges of fully-coupled high-fidelity ditching simulations

An important element of the process of aircraft certification is the demonstration of the crashworthiness of the structure in the event of an emergency landing on water, also referred to as ditching. Novel numerical simulation methods that incorporate the interaction between fluid and structure open up a promising way to model ditching in full scale. This study presents a numerical framework for the simulation of ditching on a high–fidelity level. A partitioned approach that combines a finite volume hydrodynamic fluid solver as well as an finite element structural solver is implemented using a Python-based distributed coupling environment [1]. High demands are placed both on the fluid and the structural solver. The fluid solver needs to account for hydrodynamic effects such as cavitation in order to correctly compute the ditching loads acting on the aircraft structure. In the structural model, the highly localized damage induces nonlinearities and large differences in model scale. In order to reduce the computational effort a reduced order model is used to model the failure of fuselage frames. The fluid-structure coupling requires an explicit coupling scheme. It is shown that the standard Dirichlet-Neumann approach exhibits unstable behaviour if a strong added-mass effect is present, as is the case in aircraft ditching. This indicates a need for methods other than the standard Dirichlet-Neumann approach [2].