Abstract
As aircraft structures begin to age (that is, as flight hours accumulate), existing subcritical cracks or new cracks can grow in some high‐stress points of the structural components. The usual approach is to inspect the structures periodically. Thus, a catastrophic accident during flight can be avoided. The problem then arises of choosing a sequence of inspection times which avoids both too many inspections, which may be costly, and too few inspections, that may also be costly due to a crack in an aircraft structure component not being detected for a long period. In this paper, a simple approach is proposed, where after each inspection (if a crack is not detected), we choose the next inspection point so that a crack may occur within an interval between successive inspection times with a given probability. It allows one to find the inspection policies for detection of initial cracks in critical structural components of aircraft under the assumption that the parameter values of the underlying distributions are unknown; this constraint is often met in practice. Furthermore, obtaining inspection schedules under crack propagation is considered. To illustrate the proposed technique based on ancillary statistics, numerical examples are given.
Highlights
Fatigue crack growth analysis in the presence of corrosion is an important subject, as shown in Fig 1, because it can degrade structural integrity and damage tolerance of fatigue critical structural components in aging aircrafts [3]
The objective of this paper is to propose an accurate and cost-effective methodology for probabilistic analysis of lap splices that could be used in durability and damage tolerance assessments
Following Yang it is assumed that fatigue crack growth of some items of an airframe is defined by the 12q formula [5, 4]: The parameter m - depends on the material characteristics, a (0) – equivalent beginning size of a crack
Summary
Fatigue crack growth analysis in the presence of corrosion is an important subject, as shown in Fig 1, because it can degrade structural integrity and damage tolerance of fatigue critical structural components in aging aircrafts [3]. Fatigue crack growth analysis in the presence of corrosion is an important subject, as shown, because it can degrade structural integrity and damage tolerance of fatigue critical structural components in aging aircrafts [3]. Multiple site fatigue damage (MSD) in a longitudinal skin splice has been recognized as a major airworthiness problem. It had a very significant influence on the Aloha B-737 incident in 1988. The objective of this paper is to propose an accurate and cost-effective methodology for probabilistic analysis of lap splices that could be used in durability and damage tolerance assessments
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