Damage tolerance philosophy for bonded aircraft structures

Abstract

This paper presents a damage tolerant philosophy for bonded aircraft structures and repairs. The approach presented utilizes a strain energy release rate approach for predicting bond line delamination growth and a stress intensity factor approach for predicting adherent cracking. The novel addition to the method lies within the coupled analysis of bond line and adherent failure using a displacement compatibility approach. An overview of the methodology and the necessary experimentation to implement it is presented. Additionally, two case studies are presented to illustrate the power and performance of the proposed methodology. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.