Improvement of Substitute Bird for Impact Testing

Bird strike certification relies on testing with real birds being impacted on affected zones of airframes. However, it is known that real bird testing lacks repeatability and has an unknown species’ influence. To overcome these detrimental effects, substitute birds have been developed for many years. They replicate the bird’s tissue and their shapes resemble prepared real birds. To date substitute birds can cover certain loading conditions comparable to real birds but may also show non-reproducible effects. In this paper strategies are presented to reduce the irreproducible deformation of the projectile prior to impact which leads to changing loads. The experimental results are compared with numerical simulations.