Measurement of High-speed Water Impact

High-Speed Ditching Facility CNR-INM – National Research Council - Institute of Marine Engineering - Italy By Gabriele Ribichini I thought it was a joke - at least for 5 minutes. Alessandro and I have known each other for a very long time and I’m by now well trained to receive funny requests from these guys. Alessandro was talking fast, as usual, and I could catch only a few keywords from his speech: “airplane… impacting at 50m/s... roller coaster rail ... catapult using eight bungee jumping ropes... the impact in the water will be measured by a matrix of miniaturized pressure sensors and strain gauges...”. Data acquisition system for water crash The scientist Ph.D. Alessandro Iafrati called me for help for a measurement data acquisition system for a water crash test and the more he was talking the more I realized he was not joking - and I felt like thrilled. Alessandro is working for the National Research Council of Italy, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), at an institute doing research in the marine and maritime contexts using both computational and experimental approaches. Research is oriented to ships and propellers systems, renewable energy devices and stuff like that. Airplane and water… He was referring to an EU funded project, FP7-SMAES (Smart Aircraft in Emergency Situations) motivated by the aircraft accident and the emergency landing of the US Airways Flight 1549, an incident also known as “Miracle on the Hudson”. The project aimed at better understanding the aircraft dynamics and the fluid-structure interaction during the impact with the water. At the time when he called me at the beginning of the project, the computational approaches to aircraft design and certification were not fully reliable. Tests were needed to provide a wide dataset to support the development and the validation of a new generation of computational methods. Within this context, a new High-speed ditching facility had been designed and built at headquarters of CNR-INM, which is the former INSEAN Marine Technology Research Institute, Istituto Nazionale per Studi ed Esperienze di Architettura Navale. Established in 1927, it is located in a south-western suburb of Rome and staffed with more than 120 researchers, engineers, and technicians. The new facility enabled CNR-INM to execute guided ditching tests on plates and structural components made of either aluminum and composite materials. The experimental conditions were suggested by one project’s partner (Airbus Defence and Space, Madrid) in order to overcome the important limitation of scaled model tests which do not allow to capture all the physics involved. More recently, the facility has been reused within the Eu funded project H2020-SARAH (increased SAfety & Robust Certification for the ditching of Aircraft & Helicopters). The testing facility, now named High-Speed Ditching Facility, finally looks like a roller coaster trolley mounted upside-down on a rail, and the rail is leading straight into the water.

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