國立清華大學 數學系

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared less than an hour after take-off on a route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Its mysterious fate is one of the most intriguing stories of the year 2014. Beached flaperon and wing pieces in the Reunion Island and Mauritius have confirmed that the airliner has crashed into the southern Indian Ocean. Its search and recovery operation also has constituted the most expensive one in the aviation history so far. In this talk, the speaker will first revisit the study of crashing and ditching of aircraft into the ocean as a classical water-entry problem in applied mathematics. Then the entry of an airliner intothe ocean will be modeled as a two-phase fluid-structure interation problem with compressible aero-hydrodynamics and six-degree of freedom of motion. Numerical simulations are performed by using the OpenFOAM software. Several video simulations of dynamic motion of an airliner flying into the ocean will be shown. Impact damage will also be assessed based on the analysis of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. This is joint work by G. Chen, C. Gu, P.J. Morris, E.G. Paterson, A.Sergeev, Y.-C. Wang and T. Wierzbicki. It appeared in the April 2015 issue of the Notices of The American Mathematical Society as the ``cover story'', and was named one of the top mathematical stories in media in 2015 by the American Mathematical Society.