Damage potential: A dimensionless parameter to characterize soft aircraft impact into robust targets

To investigate numerically the effect of all parameters on the outcome of an aircraft impact into robust engineering structures like nuclear power plant containments is a tedious task. In order to reduce the problem to a manageable size, we propose a single dimensionless parameter, the damage potential, to characterize the main features of the impact. The damage potential, which is the ratio of the initial kinetic energy of the aircraft to the work required to crush it, enables us to find the crucial parameter settings that need to be modelled numerically in detail. We show in this paper that the damage potential is indeed the most important parameter of the impact that determines the time-dependent reaction force when either finite element (FE) modelling or the Riera model is applied. We find that parameters that do not alter the damage potential, like elasticity of the target, are of secondary importance and if parameters are altered in a way that the damage potential remains the same then the course of the impact remains similar. We show, however, that the maximum value of the reaction force can be higher in case of elastic targets than in case of rigid targets due to the vibration of the target. The difference between the Riera and FE model results is also found to depend on the damage potential.