Multi-Site Damage in Aircraft Structural Splice Joint

Abstract

A significant difficulty of current aircraft industries is to beat the expanding demand of lower weight, higher performance and stability and longer existence of specimen at decreased expense. Much assembly procedure in critical structures like military or commercial aircraft will be based on riveted joints. These joints are inclined to crack initiation which may prompt multi-site damage, therefore lots of exertion will anticipate the life of structure under multi-site damage, in this project a piece of fuselage connection is taken for multi-site damage analysis, this interfacing part is known as splice joint. In this study, a splice joint which contains two splice panels, a doubler and stiffener made up of AL-2024 T3 is taken as the specimen. This assembly comprises of 26 rivets arranged in zigzag pattern. The load on the assembly (Splice joint) is seen to be reason of cabin internal pressurization of fuselage. The entire assembly is practically modelled utilizing MSC PATRAN programming, followed by stress analysis in MSC NASTRAN. The analysis is accomplished for no crack, single crack and multi cracks, for these entire conditions stress intensity factor are built up and crack propagation for each crack is acquired dependent on the stress intensity factor. The change in S.I.F vs. crack length behavior is studied and final failure of splice skin is analyzed.