Advances and Future Challenges in Aircraft Fuselage Section Crashworthiness: A Critical Review

Background: Crashworthiness studies the safety qualification of a vehicle (both airborne and road transports) to protect its occupants during an impact. Before an aircraft can receive transport certification, it must meet a number of crashworthiness requirements, such as the structure's deformation pattern, absorbed kinetic energy profile, and acceleration responses experienced by the components and human body models. Therefore, in recent times, crashworthiness has emerged as a crucial field of study during the early design stages of aircraft, along with other key parameters like weight reduction, load factor, fatigue life estimation, etc. Objective: The main objective of the present article is to undertake an in-depth analysis of the developments in crashworthiness related to the civil aircraft fuselage section. Furthermore, it aims to identify and address the future challenges that must be overcome to ensure the utmost safety of the occupants. Method: Based on the research objectives, the available literature is categorized into three major groups: (i) finite element code validation; (ii) improvement of the crashworthiness criteria; and (iii) impact on different surface models. A methodology to solve fuselage section crashworthiness is briefly described. A review of the research articles discussing general purpose energy absorbers for crashworthy design without any implementation to the fuselage structure is out of the scope of this article. Results: Experimental testing of fuselage section crashworthiness is expensive and non-repeatable. Furthermore, the intricate structure of the fuselage, with its numerous components, makes it nearly impossible to devise crashworthy design solutions through classical hand calculations alone. As a result, commercial software codes play a crucial role in the development of fuselage section crashworthiness, offering valuable assistance in overcoming these limitations. Conclusion: Future challenges of crashworthy design involve exploring novel materials and devices to mitigate injury during controlled crash conditions. An intriguing area of study would be the analysis of lattice components, as they have the potential to enhance crashworthiness. Furthermore, as newly designed fuselage sections emerge, it will be crucial to investigate and establish the necessary requirements to ensure compliance with crashworthiness certification standards.