Experimental validation of a UAS at engine ingestion conditions: Part 2 Model validation

With uncrewed aircraft systems (UASs) becoming more popular in recent years there is an increasing risk of a midair collision with aircraft for which there are currently no regulations in place. Bird impacts have been thoroughly studied for years and are considered soft body impacts. The bird impact research cannot be directly applied to UAS ingestions since they are hard body impacts. Some recent research has looked into understanding the differences between soft and hard body impacts on aircraft engines. However, this research used primarily unvalidated models for the harsh conditions of an ingestion event, which creates uncertainty in the results. This work intends to fill in this gap in understanding by developing a validated computational model of a UAS for engine ingestion simulations. Part I of this work presented the experimental test plan and experimental results of UAS critical components and full UAS being launched at test articles with representative features of a fan blade. This work discusses the computational modeling completed in LS-DYNA to simulate the physical tests and to update and validate the UAS models.