Risk Analysis of Organic Coating Failure on Aluminum-based Aircraft Skin

Abstract

The coating of aluminum-based aircraft skin can be damaged because of complex flight environment during service, which restricts the sustained aircraft airworthiness and safety operation. The focus of existing studies regarding the field of aircraft surface technology has been on identifying the influencing factors of organic coatings and analyzing the dynamic association patterns between factors. To extract more risk factors for organic coating failures and define their conduction path systematically and comprehensively, the leading research literature related to organic coating failure during 2015-2022 were combed and analyzed first in this study. Then, a total of 14 risk factors that lead to organic coating failure on aluminum-based skin were identified and extracted through the three-stage encoding method of grounded theory. Furthermore, the overall network characteristics, as well as the outdegree, indegree, betweenness centrality, and core-periphery characteristics, were analyzed through the social network analysis (SNA) method. Subsequently, the conduction path of risk factors, the control ability, and their position structure in the risk network was clarified. Results show that the outdegree of environmental risks and external mechanical risks is large, whereas their indegree is small, indicating that such factors can extremely easily affect other factors in the organic coating failure system. The indegree of coating risks is large, whereas their outdegree is small, manifesting that such factors can be extremely easily affected by other factors, being the factors directly leading to the organic coating failure. The betweenness centrality of maloperation is the largest, reflecting that this factor is of strong control ability as a “bridge” in the organic coating failure system. The conclusion reveals that the SNA method is feasible in analyzing the dynamic association between organic coating failure factors and compensates for the deficiencies of pure experimental measurement means. Moreover, it provides theoretical support to prevent and control organic coating failure scientifically.