FEA Makes Airframes Safer

This article focuses on data gathered during the controlled destruction of a Boeing 747 airliner are helping engineers to identify ways of strengthening aircraft to make them less vulnerable to an internal explosion. Even though it may not help engineers understand the specific events in the crash of Flight 800, a controlled explosion of a Boeing 747 by the British Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA) , based in London, could point the way to controlling the damage from airliner explosions in the future. The 747-1 00 had been an attraction at the Bruntingthorpe Aerodrome in Leicestershire, England, before it was purchased by the British Ministry of Defence and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Initially, the meshes were too coarse for the dynamic analyses to be used in the test, so engineers refined them accordingly in the blast area. Using new features in MSC/DYTRAN 4, the team will model the airframe as a series of layers, which is representative of the lining concepts to be tested.