Impact Dynamics for Advanced Aerospace Materials and Structures

The special collection on Impact Dynamics for Advanced Aerospace Materials and Structures is available in ASCE library (https://ascelibrary.org/jaeeez/impact_dynamics_aerospace_materials).

Aerospace structures could experience impact loads during their service from bird strikes, hail impacts, and engine-fan blade-outs. Impact resistance is one of the most critical evaluators for structure design as it affects the safety, reliability, and cost of aerospace structures. Impact loading can vary rapidly over time, causing the materials under impact loading to deform at high strain rates. Therefore, the strain rate–dependent mechanical properties and failure characteristics of materials become quite crucial for the safety design of engineering structures. Assessing aerospace structures under impact loads can present challenges in high-fidelity experimental characterization and constitutive modeling, high-efficiency computational and simulation methods, and the development of novel anti-impact and energy-absorption structures.

This special collection aims to highlight original studies on the topic of impact dynamics for advanced aerospace materials and structures, serving as a forum to exchange and disseminate ideas and strengthen the links between researchers in the international academic community who focus on impact dynamics. The included papers offer a diverse international perspective, covering a broad range of topics that can be grouped into three subject areas: dynamic behavior of aerospace materials, impact failure behavior of aerospace structures, and the numerical analysis and computational design of structures under dynamic loading conditions.

On the topic of dynamic behavior of aerospace materials, Yuan et al. (2020) investigated the effect of laser-metal-deposition (LMD) induced microstructures and defects on rate-dependent mechanical behavior of the LMD GH4169 in their paper, “Effect of microstructures and defects on dynamic compression and shear performance of laser metal–deposited GH4169 superalloy.” Doruk et al. (2022) studied the fatigue behavior of spot welded steel joints, and the effect of the diameter of the weld nugget and different welded joint combinations on the fatigue life of steel in their study, “Mechanical and fatigue behavior of resistance spot welded dual-phase and twinning-induced plasticity steel joints.” Ding and Binienda (2022) established a rate-dependent constitutive model of green birch wood through quasi-static characterization and impact-test correlation in their paper “Characterization of nonlinear birchwood model with strain rate effect.” Metamaterial and lattice structures have attracted great attention from academic researchers due to their great potential for use as highly efficient energy-absorption or impact-resistant structures. Focusing on lattice structures, Deng et al. (2022) designed and evaluated the rate-dependent mechanical properties of four types of truss lattice by combining octet truss unit cells with other elementary unit cells in their study, “Mechanical properties of three-dimensional printed combination-design truss lattice materials: Static and dynamic loading.” Yang et al. (2022b) investigated the effects of geometric parameters on the energy-absorption capacity of truncated square pyramid folded structures in their paper, “Parametric study of truncated square pyramid folded structure for effective energy absorption under static and dynamic crushing.” Karagiozova et al. (2022) explored the effective properties and energy-absorption features of Miura-ori metamaterial subjected to high-velocity impact and compared the results to those for metamaterials under quasi-static loads in their study, “Response of graded Miura-ori metamaterials to quasi-static and dynamic in-plane compression.”

On the topic of impact failure behavior of aerospace structures, Edwards et al. (2022) experimentally and numerically revealed the presence of adiabatic shear bands within impacted 2024-T351 aluminum plates and consequential low-energy failure mechanism in their paper, “Ballistic impact of flat-ended projectiles against 2024-T351 plate: Experiments and modeling.” In another investigation of an aluminum alloy, Xi et al. (2022) characterized the rate-dependent constitutive properties of 2A16 aluminum alloy and investigated its impact behavior under various impact velocities in their paper, “Constitutive behavior and ballistic performance of aerospace 2A16 aluminum alloy under different impact velocities.” Aslebagh and Cherniaev (2022) focused on sandwich composites, investigating the effects of the projectile shape on the ballistic performance of aluminum honeycomb-core sandwich panels subjected to hypervelocity impacts in their study, “Projectile shape effects in hypervelocity impact of honeycomb-core sandwich structures.” Gulla et al. (2022) investigated the low-velocity impact failure behavior of sandwich plates made from composites skins and a foam core as well as the influence of infusion process parameters in their paper, “Impact behaviors of sandwich composites produced by liquid resin infusion: Influences of the process parameters.” Weng et al. (2022) investigated the separation mechanism and evaluated the feasibility of carbon fiber–reinforced plastic (CFRP)-based separation devices in their study, “Influence of buffer substance on separation mechanism of CFRP-based separation devices with shaped charges.” Chen et al. (2022a) examined the dynamic compression behavior and energy-absorption capability of composites with sinusoidally periodic helicoidal fiber architectures in their paper, “Defense mechanism of bioinspired composites with sinusoidally periodic helicoidal fiber architectures.” Atahan and Apalak (2022) investigated the low-speed oblique impact behavior of dissimilar single-lap joints and the effect of major influence factors on adhesive strength, in their paper “Low-speed oblique impact response of adhesively bonded dissimilar single-lap joints.”

On the topic of numerical analysis and computational design for impact problems, Yang et al. (2022a) modeled the biaxial compression behavior of the carbon fiber–reinforced composites after low-velocity impact, following the numerical validation against uniaxial compression test in their study, “Modeling of biaxial compression behavior of carbon fiber–reinforced composite after low-velocity impact.” Demir et al. (2022) applied a bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization method with the fatigue failure criterion of closed Soderberg in the design of a pitch arm for a helicopter tail rotor, in their paper “Fatigue damage based topology optimization of helicopter tail rotor pitch arm.” In their paper “Dynamic crack propagation along elastic interfaces in double cantilever beams under high loading rates,” Chen et al. (2022b) developed a new theory to describe the stick-slip crack propagation behavior and to measure the crack initiation and crack arrest toughness for mode-I fracture of double cantilever beams under high loading rates. In their paper “New numerical modeling for impact dynamics behavior of composite honeycomb sandwich structures,” Kamran et al. (2020) developed an extended $P\text{-}\alpha$ model to describe the equivalent property of honeycomb materials and to model the ballistic impact response of sandwich structures. Liu et al. (2020) proposed a point-based modeling method for meso-mechanical simulation of effective properties and high-velocity impact behavior of braided composites in their paper, “Point-based mesoscopic modeling and simulation for two-step 3D braided composites.” Song et al. (2023) developed an adaptive transfer method that involved coupling the finite-element method and discrete-element method (DEM) to simulate bird strikes on aeroengine fan blades in their paper, “A novel FEM-DEM adaptive transfer method for the bird-strike simulation.”

The guest editors would like to acknowledge Professor Wieslaw K. Binienda, Editor-in-Chief of the journal, for his support and encouragement for developing this special collection. In addition, this special collection would not have been possible without the support of the reviewers in providing timely and constructive comments during the peer review process.