Experimental validation of a UAS at engine ingestion conditions: Part I Experiments

In recent years, uncrewed aircraft systems (UASs) have greatly increased in popularity and accessibility to the public. This dramatic increase has led to a substantial risk of a midair collision between a UAS and a commercial aircraft, and these collisions need to be analyzed to understand the dangers associated with them. Soft body (i.e., birds or ice) impacts have been happening since the early days of flight and have been studied thoroughly. In contrast, there has been significantly less research on hard body impacts, with most of the currently published research not using experimentally validated models at the conditions expected to be seen in an engine ingestion. The purpose of this work is to discuss the design and execution of experiments to improve and validate a UAS model for high speed impacts for future engine ingestion studies. The overall effort consisted of first conducting physical tests that represent specific high speed ingestion scenarios. Then simulating these tests using a high fidelity finite element tool. Then finally updating the model as necessary. The design of the experiments, experimental test setup, instrumentation and experimental results are highlighted in Part I of this work. The computational model update and validation of the UAS at conditions seen in an engine ingestion are done in Part II of this work.