Abstract

Bird impacts can be extremely critical events for the air transport safety. Since aircraft structures have become more and more complex components, the numerical prediction of the damage onset and evolution induced by a bird impact has become a very challenging task. The aim of this work is to provide a brief overview of the numerical techniques adopted for the prediction of the bird impact phenomenon on a leading edge of a regional aircraft wing. Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), Rigid and Lagrangian models have been investigated and the results have been compared and critically assessed.

Abstract

Security of chemical and oil & gas facilities became a pressing issue after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, due to relevant quantities of hazardous substances that may be present in these sites. Oil & gas pipelines, connecting such facilities, might be potential targets for intentional attacks. The majority of methods addressing pipeline security are mostly qualitative or semi-quantitative, based on expert judgment and thus potentially subjective. In the present study, an innovative security vulnerability assessment methodology is developed, based on Discrete-time Bayesian network (DTBN) technique to investigate the vulnerability of a hazardous facility (pipeline in this study) considering the performance of security countermeasures in place. The methodology is applied to an illustrative gas pipeline in order to rank order the pipeline segments based upon their criticality.