Vulnerability assessment to projectiles: Approach definition and application to helicopter platforms

Survivability is defined as the capability of a platform to avoid or withstand a man-made hostile environment. Military aircraft in particular, but also other kinds of platforms subjected to external, impacting threats, are commonly designed according to increasing survivability requirements. The concept of survivability was first formalized by R. Ball in 1985 in its seminal work on combat aircraft survivability. On the basis of the theory presented in his work, many computer programs have been developed which implement the modelling techniques and computations required by vulnerability assessments. However, a clear and general view of the operative computational procedures is still lacking. Moreover, to date only a limited number of applications to helicopter platforms have been investigated in the survivability field, even though these platforms experience numerous flight conditions exposing the system to different types of threats. In this context, this work aims at establishing a multi-purpose general framework for the vulnerability assessment of different types of platforms subjected to external threats, with a focus on helicopters. The in-house software specifically developed for this application is here described in detail and employed to present a case study on a representative military helicopter.