Aircraft vulnerability assessment against fragmentation warhead

This article presents the detailed methodology developed for the vulnerability assessment of the military aircraft against fragmentation warhead. Vulnerability assessment methodology consists of calculation of the dispersion of the fragments, determination of the hit locations, penetration calculations and probability of kill calculations for the aircraft utilizing the fault tree established for the particular aircraft studied. Based on the developed methodology, vulnerability assessment and survivability analysis of a generic aircraft is performed for different predefined approach angles of the missile threat. For the measure of the vulnerability, mean volume of effectiveness of the warhead is proposed as the metric which is defined as the volume integral of the probability of kill distribution around the aircraft for different intercept directions of the missile. Through the case study, it is shown that mean volume of effectiveness can be used as the single measure of the overall vulnerability assessment of the aircraft. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.