Developing an anisotropic material for Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) usage

ABSTRACT

An Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) is a bed of crushable material located at the end of an airfield runway within the runway safety area (RSA). An EMAS promotes aircraft stoppage during an aircraft overrun event. Typically, EMAS installations consist of isotropic cementitious material blocks. In contrast, this article explores the potential for using a light-weight anisotropic plastic material composed of unidirectional tubes (honeycomb configuration) as an alternative EMAS material. During this study, a number of laboratory tests were conducted to characterise the stress–strain behaviour of the proposed material. The material testing considered multiple force incidence angles with respect to the material tube orientation. These anisotropic material characterisation results were used as input to a numerical model for determining aircraft performance within an EMAS. The calculated performance results were then compared with the aircraft performance within the EMAS considering other potential EMAS isotropic materials. The results suggest that the compressive strength of the proposed anisotropic material needs to be reduced in order to compare well with those of other potential isotropic materials. The present article analyzes overrun events with the anisotropic material internal tubes oriented parallel to the aircraft motion direction.

KEYWORDS:

• EMAS
• arresting material
• airfield safety
• aircraft overrun

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).