Damage Tolerance Analysis of Aircraft Fuselage Riveted Joint Panel

Abstract

The design philosophy in the field of aircraft construction is getting transfer from fail safe design to damage tolerance design. Damage tolerance design improves the life of a component. A two seater aircraft structural member was found to have an expected life of ten thousand hours. The fatigue life of the aircraft if increased, could give an improvement to the life of the aircraft too. The aircraft had a history of structural failures at the rear part of the fuselage, at the wing spars etc. The rivets used are areas of greater stress concentrations and thereby chances of failures due to them are high. The riveting pattern is what determines the amount of stress concentrations there. Also the residual stresses add to this factor. In this project a piece similar to the fuselage skin, of same material and the riveting pattern is tested for deformation, fatigue and multi site damage. Then the riveting pattern is changed to other types of riveting and tested again. The data obtained are then compared. This could be used as an improvement to the skin structure of that aircraft. The testing is to be one both with FEA software and also experimentally done.