Publications
Calculating the impact force of supersonic hail stones using SWAT-TEEM
In the aerospace industry, hail strikes on a structure are an environment that must be considered when qualifying a product. Performing a physical test on a product would require a test setup that would launch a fabricated hail stone at an expensive prototype. This test may be difficult or impossible to execute and destructive to the product. Instead of testing, a finite element model (FEM) may be used to simulate the damage and consequences of a hail strike. In order to use a FEM in this way, an accurate representation of the input force from a hail stone must be known. The purpose of this paper is to calculate the force that a hail stone imparts on an object using the inverse method SWAT-TEEM. This paper discusses the advantages of using SWAT-TEEM over other force identification methods and exercises the algorithm for a test series of hail strikes that include multiple angles of attack and multiple velocities which include speeds that are supersonic.