Airborne collision severity study on engine ingestion caused by harmless-categorized drones

Abstract

The drone weight less than 250g is often treated as a 'harmless' category by many authorities such as EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency) and CAAS (Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore). Is this small drone really safe and does not affect the operation of commercial aircraft? This paper is devoted to presenting a Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation method to analyze the performance of the commercial aircraft engine under the collision of the harmless categorized drone with a weight of 250g. The damage levels of the fan blades and compressor blades during the drone collision process are both investigated. Besides, another type of drone with a much higher weight (750g) is also analyzed to give a comparison study. The result shows no apparent damage to the aircraft engine fan blades, IGV, and LPC blades for the drone of MAVIC MINI, while some damage can be detected for the engine fan blades under the impact of the drone of MAVIC Pro.

Collision Severity Evaluation of Generalized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Impacting on Aircraft Engines

“…Results from the study highlight that an aircraft colliding with a 'Large' drone shows the highest risk of penetration and damage as the kinetic energy at 250 knots exceeds that of bird weighing 4 pounds. Hence, the scope of the current study included 'Small', 'Medium' and 'Large' only as the 'Harmless' classification has been studied by [9]. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) performed an initial assessment to understand the risk and likelihood of an unintentional collision between a drone and manned aircraft [10].…”

Numerical Investigation of Drone Strikes with Various Aircraft Targets

“…On the basis of their numerical results they conclude, that a drone strike produces more damage than a bird strike for the same kinetic energy. Further authors like Song and Schroeder [8][9][10][11], Man et al [12], Schwab [13], Lyons et al [14], Yu et al [15], Hou et al [16] as well as Liu et al [17] investigated the impact of drones with engines. Together, these studies show that the ingestion of a drone will lead to severe damage within the ingestion, especially in the area of the fan.…”