Numerical Modelling of a Lightning Strike on a Protected Composite Panel
Résumé
The increased usage of carbon-fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites in aerospace has made the investigation of the direct effects of a lightning strike (LS) on protected CFRP desirable. Among others, recent works based on the electrical-thermal model of Ogasawara et al. [1] use electrical-thermal analysis to evaluate the effect of resin pyrolysis on the induced bulk damage of unprotected CFRP panels [2]. A coupled thermal-mechanical model is proposed here which considers non-linearities and temperature dependency of material behaviour for the lightning strike protection (LSP) and CFRP. The thermal and mechanical loads calculated from [3] and [4] are applied on a single representative weighted-average arc-root radius rcₐvg over selected time steps on a CFRP protected by a solid copper foil (SCF). Hypotheses are proposed and subsequently validated for the cohesive behaviour between the SCF and CFRP panel apart from further investigating the effect of a paint layer through parametric study.