Measurement of Artificial and Real Bird Impact on a Very Rigid Flat Surface

Bird cadavers are used for development and certification testing of aircraft engines and structures to ensure that they can survive a bird strike during operation. The use of real birds has several disadvantages, including unsanitary test conditions, the need to euthanize animals, difficulty in procuring birds of the correct mass and species at arbitrary times of the year, and variability in test results due to bird-to-bird differences and the difficulty in launching an irregularly shaped projectile in a repeatable manner. Artificial bird projectiles could overcome many of the disadvantages of real birds and may be acceptable to designers and certification authorities if they can be shown to produce a similar response to that of real birds. This has led to the investigation of artificial bird materials that can be used in lieu of real birds that would produce the same damage and response in aircraft structures as real birds.