The existence of simultaneous fatigue cracking in aircraft structures, generally referred to as Widespread Fatigue Damage (WFD), is one of the important damage tolerance and structural integrity concerns in aging commercial and military aircraft. Although it is now being increasingly recognized that the prediction of fatigue crack growth is best conducted in a probabilistic framework, there has been no sufficient research effort geared toward the development of unique probabilistic analysis algorithms for assessing the integrity of aircraft structural components inflicted with widespread fatigue damage. The present paper reports the formulation and illustrative application of a stochastic reliability model for the probabilistic assessment of WFD in aircraft structures. The model considers various failure criteria such as sudden crack link-up or coalescence and accounts for unique WFD features such as the interaction of cracks with each other and with structural features. Investigations show that the consideration of reliability limit states for individual fatigue cracks as components of a conventional system generally leads to dangerous overprediction of system reliability, compared to the model developed herein. Probabilistic sensitivity studies are also conducted to study the influence of the problem parameters on the reliability results.
Probabilistic assessment of multiple site damage in aircraft structures
Probabilistische Bewertung eines Mehrfachschadens in Flugzeugkonstruktionen
1996
8 Seiten, 2 Bilder, 2 Tabellen, 12 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
Probabilistic Assessment of Multiple Site Damage in Aircraft Structures
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