Development of a multibody system for crashworthiness certification of aircraft seat

This work proposes a multibody approach in the simulation of 16-g aircraft seats, referred to the front-row of seats located behind bulkheads compliance with the Head Injury Criteria (HIC) requirement. The multibody model of the seat structure has been developed and analysed by using a home-made algorithm implemented in Matlab®code, as a 2D system of rigid bodies interconnected by springs and joints. The research has been oriented to assess the capability of simulating a 16g frontal impact of a sled equipped with the seat of a regional aircraft on which an anthropomorphic dummy is arranged. This sled test, for which experimental data were available, has been used as test case; inertial and structural properties of the system have also been experimentally and numerically evaluated in order to make the numerical model compliant with the real one. One of the primary goals of the paper is to provide an intuitive, easily extendable numerical tool to support designers in multibody simulation and to define a tool able to obtain global sled-test results in very short time, especially if compared to the computational time of a detailed finite element simulation. This tool will allow running sensitivity analysis and first level optimisation of key design parameters, integrating itself in the design cycle, not in place of, but as a support to the main simulation tools.