Studies on Establishing a Methodology for Predicting the Riveted Joints Fatigue Durability in Aircraft Structures

Abstract

In this paper are described fatigue physical tests that were performed on a great number of riveted specimens with different constructive and technological parameters. Some of the purposes of the experimental tests, they were: determining the number of load cycles at which cracks by fatigue occurred, determining the moment of initiation, the location and propagation speed of the fatigue crack. For fatigue crack evolution study numerical models were designed. A simplified model for FEM analysis was proposed that reduced considerable the calculus effort and allows models for complex riveted joints. From the described experiments on specimens and numerical simulations there are some important conclusions regarding the fatigue phenomenon in riveted joints such as: important peculiarity of damage by multiple cracks is the cracks junction of adjacent rivet holes, which contributes, by jumping, to increase the degradation rate of assembly; the riveted joint model can be applied with good accuracy to estimate the durability of the structures inclusively to identify and prevent the cases of widespread fatigue damage.