Rapid Assessment of Structural Vulnerability

ABSTRACT: To support Air Force live fire test programs, including design of experiments (DOE), range safety, test apparatus design, model validation, post test simulations, vulnerability analysis (used by analysis of alternative (AoA) studies for design and war game (campaign, mission, and engagement) simulations for accurate kill removal assessment) a tool is needed to rapidly determine the probability of global failure given local damage for many threat/shotline combinations.The rapid structural vulnerability tool that results from this project will enable analysts to rapidly determine the residual strength of damaged aircraft structures.In addition the tool will be fast enough to handle thousands of threat, velocity, hit location, and orientation combinations per day. It will also use the resulting data to create probability of kill tables for vulnerability analyses.The finished tool will accommodate damage from any combination of impact, blast, Hydrodynamic Ram (HRAM), fragmentation, and thermal (fire, directed energy, laser, etc.) damage mechanisms.; BENEFIT: While this technology will be beneficial for a wide variety of military applications in any of the services, it is equally if not more relevant to commercial interests, such as infrastructure and buildings, aircraft, marine craft, and space vehicles.Many bridges and buildings can be represented with this technology and would benefit from vulnerability modeling to simulate damage from storms, terrorism, or even car crashes.Commercial aircraft are also subject to a variety of damage for which vulnerability modeling would be an appropriate precaution, including uncontained engine failure, mid-air impacts with unmanned aerial vehicles, and terrorism.Commercial marine craft have similar issues with terrorism or collisions. Any number of applications exist in the realm of commercial space flight from launch damage to impacts with various scale of debris while in orbit to otherwise uninteresting damage that is exacerbated by the unique thermal environment presented in space.