Conference article

In recent years, the number of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) operating in the sky of urban centres has quite increased due to the facilities to purchase this type of vehicle. Consequently, the risk of an airborne impact between these vehicles and manned aircrafts has been target of concern with incidents been reported recently. Although the current aircrafts had been designed to support bird strikes, a collision with an UAS could be more critical, as reported in a study published by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2016. In the present paper, a commercial aircraft Wing Fixed Leading Edge (WFLE) was first designed to support a bird strike. Then, its skin and spar thicknesses were increased so the WFLE could withstand an impact with an UAS. The safety criterion adopted was that the lithium-ion battery from the UAS could not penetrate into the airframe when the impact occurs at the airliner cruising speed. Finally, the weight from both WFLE configurations were compared so the mass increase could be quantified. During simulation, the same mass was considered for the UAS and the bird, although they were modelled using different materials. Modelling procedures were verified with test data found in other papers and the results obtained presented acceptable correlation. The UAS considered was a quadcopter configuration intended for recreational and commercial aerial photography with a 1.8 kg mass. The results showed that spar thicknesses increase were more effective than increases in the skin thicknesses.

UAS impact, bird strike, wing fixed leading edge, simulation