Safety of air travel is regarded as an important feature of airline industry. Collision of birds with aircraft can challenge the perception of safety and inflicts direct and indirect financial damage to airlines. This collision, also known as bird strike, has been the subject of numerous researches in recent years. The convenience, simplicity and low cost of bird strike analysis through simulation have made it a common approach for research on this subject. But like any other simulation approach, the most important issue is the validity and accuracy of obtained results; so researchers often develop their models by first simulating a simple experiment and gauging the accuracy against the experimental data. One of the best and most widely used sources of experimental data used for this purpose is the Willbeck’s bird strike test. A large number of software parameters can affect the outputs of a simulation. The correct selection of all these parameters such that there would be a minimum difference between simulation and experimental results is not an easy task. The goal of this study is to assess and analyze these parameters in Ls-Dyna software. To achieve this goal, the most important parameters affecting the simulation results are considered as design variables and the Taguchi method is used to determine how and to what extent these parameters affect the modeling error. Moreover, the values of these parameters are selected such that the simulation results would achieve the highest similarity with that of experimental results.

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