Modeling Fuel Spurt from Impacts on Fuel Tanks

ABSTRACT: The SURVICE Engineering Team proposes development of a fast-running engineering-level fluid dynamics model to quantify and characterize the fuel spurt and droplet formation resulting from ballistic penetration into an aircraft fuel tank. The ultimate goal places emphasis on a fast running solution that can allow multiple evaluations rather than a single event answer. This engineering level approach is required to support a wide variation of ballistic vulnerability assessments and to account for variations of testing parameters during test planning. The proposed approach will focus on researching the problem and developing an alpha-level code applying classical fluid dynamics computations and test data. The phase I algorithm development and validation will show feasibility of the approach. Phase II and beyond will expand the research and development with additional testing and computational fluid dynamics modeling to enhance the algorithms. BENEFIT: If a computational fuel spurt model capability existed today, it would certainly be used within the DoD government and industry markets to further understand the potential of ballistic threat initiated fire onboard aircraft. In addition, since the hydrodynamic effects apply to any fluid filled tank, it would also apply to ground and sea vehicles as well. The research, testing, and development conducted during this SBIR in the short term (immediately) will benefit the combat vulnerability evaluation and combat system development organizations for further understanding the ballistic effects that drive fuel spurt and droplet formation for fire predictions. This knowledge can be applied immediately to any DoD acquisition program concerned with fire. This is very evident by SURVICE"s involvement with the major fire test and evaluation programs currently in progress as well as our involvement with historical aircraft, ground vehicle, and sea vehicle acquisition programs. In the long term the knowledge, algorithms, and models developed during this SBIR can also be applied to the commercial airline marketplace as the threats against passenger aircraft become a concern.