Design and analysis of a 9G safety barrier for cargo airplanes

The aim of this project was to design and analyse a safety barrier for a freighter airplane capable of resisting impacts of cargo containers accelerated at 9G during crash landings. The project was developed during the group design project for my MSc at Cranfield University. In order to protect the crew from the cargo in event of crash a robust yet lightweight safety barrier is necessary. In this model two containers, weighing 4.2 tons each, were impacted against the barrier at a speed of about 8 m/s. In order to simulate the impact, an Explicit Non-linear Dynamic solver has been used with the help of the software ABAQUS. The barrier itself is made of two skins of aluminium and a core of aluminium honeycomb. To lighten and speed up the simulation a crushable foam model has been used to simulate the crash behaviour of the honeycomb. The barrier is fastened to the fuselage using beam connectors and tie constraints have been applied to skins and core of the composite barrier. The plastic behaviour of the aluminium has been modeled with the Johnson-Cook material model and the strain rate dependency has also been considered.