Aircraft Wing Design Against Bird Strike Using Metaheuristics

• Published in: Aerospace Vol. 12; no. 5; p. 436
• Main Authors: Timhede, Vanessa, Timhede, Silvia, Winyangkul, Seksan, Sleesongsom, Suwin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.05.2025
• Subjects: Accuracy; Aeronautics; Aircraft; Alloys; Aluminum alloys; Aviation; Bird impact; bird strike; Bird-aircraft collisions; Birds; Design analysis; Design optimization; Finite element analysis; Fluid mechanics; Function analysis; Heuristic methods; Impact analysis; MHs; Optimization techniques; Pressure distribution; regression; response surface method; Response surface methodology; Risk reduction; Simulation; Skin; Sweep angle; Thickness; Velocity; Viscosity; Wing design; Wings (aircraft)
• ISSN: 2226-4310; 2226-4310
• DOI: 10.3390/aerospace12050436

Bird strikes pose a significant threat to aviation safety, particularly affecting the wing structures of aircraft. This research aims to design and analyze the impact of bird strikes on wing structures using response surface method and metaheuristics (MHs), which are used to explore various risk minimization and damage mitigation techniques. The optimization problem is the minimization of the maximum von Mises stress of aircraft wing structure against bird strike that is subject to displacement and stress constraints. The design variables include skin and rib thickness, as well as sweep angle. Difficulty due to embedded bird strike simulation and optimization design can be alleviated using a response surface method (RSM). The regression technique in the RSM of the data can reach our goal of model fitting with a higher R2 until 0.9951 and 0.9919 are obtained for the displacement and von Mises stress model, respectively. The response surface function of the displacement and von Mises stress are related to skin thickness, while sweep angles rather than rib thickness have a greater impact on both design variables. The optimized design of the design variables is performed using MHs, which are TLBO, JADE, and PBIL. The comparative result of MHs can conclude that the PBIL outperformed others in all descriptive statistics. The optimized design results revealed that the optimum solution can release better energy due to bird strike with the highest limit of skin thickness, moderate rib thickness, and less than half of the sweep angle. The results are in accordance with the response surface function analysis. In conclusion, the optimized design of the aircraft wing structure against bird strike can be accomplished with our proposed technique.