Computational methods for bird strike simulations: A review

Bird strikes are a major threat to aircraft structures, as a collision with a bird during flight can lead to serious structural damage. Computational methods have been used for more than 30 years for the bird-proof design of such structures, being an efficient tool compared to the expensive physical certification tests with real birds. At the velocities of interest, the bird behaves as a soft body and flows in a fluid-like manner over the target structure, with the high deformations of the spreading material being a major challenge for finite element simulations. This paper gives an overview on the development, characteristics and applications of different soft body impactor modeling methods by an extensive literature survey. Advantages and disadvantages of the most established techniques, which are the Lagrangian, Eulerian or meshless particle modeling methods, are highlighted and further topics like the appropriate choice of impactor geometry or material model are discussed. A tabular overview of all bird strike simulation papers covered by this survey with detailed information on the software, modeling method, impactor geometry, mass and velocity as well as the target application of each study is given in the appendix of this paper.

► Bird strike simulations on aircraft structures have been performed and improved since the late 1970s.
► Large variety of bird impactor geometries, materials, masses, densities and modelling methods exists in the literature.
► Today, three established techniques for numerical bird impactor modelling are used: Lagrangian, Eulerian and SPH.
► Each technique has specific advantages/disadvantages.
► The best approach depends on the specific application, software package, computational resources and parameter setup.