Damage assessment of aircraft wing subjected to blast wave with finite element method and artificial neural network tool

Damage assessment of the wing under blast wave is essential to the vulnerability reduction design of aircraft. This paper introduces a critical relative distance prediction method of aircraft wing damage based on the back-propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN), which is trained by finite element simulation results. Moreover, the finite element method (FEM) for wing blast damage simulation has been validated by ground explosion tests and further used for damage mode determination and damage characteristics analysis. The analysis results indicate that the wing is more likely to be damaged when the root is struck from vertical directions than others for a small charge. With the increase of TNT equivalent charge, the main damage mode of the wing gradually changes from the local skin tearing to overall structural deformation and the overpressure threshold of wing damage decreases rapidly. Compared to the FEM-based damage assessment, the BP-ANN-based method can predict the wing damage under a random blast wave with an average relative error of 4.78%. The proposed method and conclusions can be used as a reference for damage assessment under blast wave and low-vulnerability design of aircraft structures.