A DYNAMIC ANALYSIS STUDY OF AIRCRAFT SEAT CONFIGURATION FOR CRASHWORTHINESS

Resumo

Every day, around 180,000 commercial flights transport people to all parts of the globe.
Although the airplane is one of the safest means of transportation, it is well known that when accidents
occur many lives are at risk. Through dynamic simulation, these situations can be computationally
modeled to understand the forces, velocities, displacements, and accelerations acting at the plane
components/ passenger model and more suitable materials, convenient geometries and seat structures
can be tested/ improved to increase passenger’s safety. In the present work, a specific guideline is
developed in the software LS-DYNA for those who are interested in this type of research. From
import/create the aircraft CAD seat geometry, meshing the model, dummy positioning, belt fitting,
contact definitions, setting the boundary conditions and model parametrization, to post-processing, a
simple example is given showing the step by step procedure to model an aircraft seat with a dummy in
emergency landing conditions. The result is to obtain the head injury criterion (HIC) for this example
and compare with the ones found in literature, showing the importance of studying passenger's safety
and keep improving their survival conditions in emergency landing situations.