Integration of cabin environment into the aircraft crashworthiness assessment process

Abstract Passenger safety is a primary concern of non-conventional aircraft design, involving new safety problems to explore and strict regulation requirements. For these configurations, the crash load mitigation may affect the overall fuselage design, hence it must be considered from the earliest design phases. A multidisciplinary aircraft design process chain is established at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). This collaborative process, which includes plenty of DLR institutes, relies on the parametric CPACS data format to exchange models and results across disciplines and levels of detail. The Institute of Structures and Design actively contributes to the process chain with its Python tool PANDORA. This design environment can automatically generate CPACS-based aircraft Finite Element (FE) models, to perform structural analysis, crashworthiness assessment and sizing. In this paper, PANDORA is extended to generate automatic multi-fidelity fuselage FE models, including the cabin environment and dummies. As a result, the generation of a cabin based on CPACS geometric and structural data is rapidly achieved, enabling parametric crashworthiness studies of full aircraft models. Preliminary results, automatic injury criteria post-processing and validation benchmarks are presented to illustrate the novel methodology. The implementation aims to support the development of innovative aircraft concepts, allowing designers to consider occupant safety from the first design iterations. This is the first step towards establishing a process chain to tackle safety challenges of novel designs, such as zero-emission configurations or high-density cabins, in which the design space is yet to be explored and parametric analysis is of fundamental importance.