Analysis of the Longitudinal Crush Environment for Small Radioactive Material Packages Involved in an Aircraft Crash

摘要

This paper has analyzed, in three separate ways, the longitudinal crush load which can be applied to a small hazardous material (RAM) package which is located in a forward cargo position on a standard body or wide-body cargo aircraft. The load analysis was developed using the concept of a cargo load column. The main purpose of the analysis was to more accurately describe the dynamic crush loads which can be applied to a (RAM) package positioned in the cargo aircraft as described above. In fact, one goal of the analysis was to evaluate these longitudinal crush loads and see if they were bounded by reasonable magnitudes of force. An attempt to determine such a bound was made by structural stability arguments concerning the cargo load column and the attendant structural disintegration of cargo aircraft in severe aircraft crashes. Another bounding mechanism was to limit the dynamic effect of aft loaded cargo on a forward loaded hazardous material package by allowing only the aft cargo in the volume of the cargo load column to impinge upon the hazardous material package. Using the LAARC package as an example problem, the stability arguments in combination with the relatively small dimensions of the LAARC design produced longitudinal crush loads even lower than the vertical crush 311 kN (70,000 lbs) forces. The dynamic loads on the cargo load column which did not incorporate stability arguments produced longitudinal crush loads of 939 kN (211,000 lbs) on the LAARC package which are approximately a factor of three larger than the vertical crush forces of 312 kN (70,000 lbs). While the disparate analyses presented cannot yield a definitive upper limit on the longitudinal crush forces that might be experienced by a RAM package in a severe aircraft accident, it is concluded that they do provide a reasonable bound on the problem. (ERA citation 06:002046)