Numerical Analysis of Bird Impact on a GLARE Plate

GLARE is a “Glass Fibre Reinforced Epoxy/Aluminum FMLs (Fibre Metal Laminates)” and has been reported for its excellent impact resistance. In this paper, a numerical model for bird impact on an aluminium alloy plate was established, using the explicit finite element code PAM-CRASH first. A corresponding bird impact experiment was carried out and the simulations were compared with the experimental results. The good agreement between them confirms the accuracy of the numerical analysis model, including the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) bird model and the aluminium alloy constitutive model. In the second part of the paper, another simulation on a thinner 2024-T3 aluminum alloy plate was performed, which was used to determine the critical bird impact speed for the plate. By combining the Johnson-Cook model for aluminum alloy and Continuum Damage Mechanics (CDM) theory for the glass fibre reinforced composites, a constitutive model for GLARE was derived. Impact simulations on the GLARE plate with the same thickness and impact speed as the 2024-T3 plate shows no penetration on the GLARE plate and indicates that GLARE can effectively improve the impact resistance of a structure.