Aircraft duraluminum wing spar fatigue testing

Abstract

Experimental fatigue crack growth analysis of the aircraft structural component subjected to different cycling loading has been presented. The purpose of the experimental test was to evaluates the fatigue behavior of the real aircraft spar, made in aluminum 2024-T3. In-house laboratory fatigue test installation is described in the paper. The spar-test specimen has been manufactured specifically for the cycling damage testing. Test results were obtained with most modern equipment for data acquisition. Applied loads and obtained spar fatigue results are described in detail. Conclusions have been made with reference to the previous work on the duraluminum spar fatigue testing. As it is presented in the previous work with advanced numerical methods for fatigue analysis, in this paper is given an opinion on the same. At the end, possible directions of the further experimental spar fatigue testing is given and shows us that it makes sense to make the comparison beetwen real and numerical results only in situations where cracks behave similarly and the numbers of required cycles are about the same.