Crashworthiness behaviour of a composite fuselage section with cargo door

This paper present the crashworthiness assessment of a composite fuselage section with a cargo door by means of the Finite Element (FE) software ABAQUS/Explicit. In crashworthiness research, no analysis, either experimental or numerical, of a composite fuselage section with a cargo door has ever been carried out. Therefore, the numerical analysis of the vertical drop test of three models of composite fuselage sections, representative of a regional aircraft fuselage, will be performed: a typical fuselage section without cargo door, a section with the cargo door but not the appropriate reinforced structure and a section with the surrounding door structure reinforced as in commercial aircraft sections with such cut-outs. In order to guarantee the integrity of the passengers as well as the structure, the crash kinematics of each model as well as the accelerations experienced by the passengers have been compared and examined in detail. The comparison between the three models allowed to identify the penalty that a duly reinforced cargo door structure induces on the crashworthiness of a composite fuselage.