PROJECT DETAILS

• Client: SEAIRTECH
• Date: 2020
• Technology: Explicit FEM simulation. Fracture and damage of composite materials

INTRODUCTION

ICEMM has carried out the certification of frangibility analysis of the GP tower and LOC antennas service structures, located in Vigo’s airport (Spain).

At airports, frangible installations are defined as “an object of low mass, designed to break, distort or yield on impact, so as to present the minimum hazard to aircraft which might crash against it, while it withstands the environmental and operational loads “.

Following the Aerodrome Design Manual, different flight speed conditions have to be evaluated in this kind of structures: 50 km/h when the aeroplane circulates on the runway and 140 km/h when the aircraft is flying nearby . For frangible structures, a detailed shell finite element model was defined and, for the impactor object, analytical rigid body was determined.

In order to simulate how much speed the impactor could lose and how much energy the frangible structures could absorbe due to the crash, Explicit analysis was performed by Abaqus Software. Here, it can be seen the impactor crash evolution and the frangible structure failure of one of our certificated analysis.