On the static strength of aluminium and carbon fibre aircraft lap joint repairs

Abstract

The behaviour of various aircraft lap joint repair configurations is investigated experimentally and numerically under static loading. The lap joints consist of aluminium alloy (AA) 2024-T3 substrates repaired with twin single-sided AA 2024-T3 or Carbon Fibre Reinforced Epoxy (CFRE) doublers. Pure riveted, pure bonded and hybrid (riveted and bonded) joints of metal–metal and metal–composite configurations are investigated. From experimental results, joints with adhesive bond showed nearly 5 times higher average strength than pure riveted joints, while hybrid joints performed better than riveted and bonded joints because of higher stiffness. On the other hand, hybrid metal–metal joint has 70% higher average strength compared to hybrid metal–composite joint. Rivet-shear has caused failure of riveted joints, and adhesive failure is observed in pure bonded joints. Hybrid joints with metal doublers have failed initially due to adhesive failure and later rivet shear. Interestingly, net-section failure is observed in composite doublers with breakage of doublers due to the presence of holes in the doublers. Experimental results are complimented with numerical analysis using commercial finite element code ABAQUS. Load–displacement curves obtained from the numerical results are in good agreement with experiments with a marginal error of 2%. In addition to load–displacement curves, a detailed stress analysis is performed numerically on metal–metal and metal-composite joints under riveted, bonded and hybrid configurations to study stress distribution on substrate and doublers. Numerical analysis showed hybrid and bonded joints have lower stresses in substrate and doublers compared to the riveted joints. Bonded joints have smoother load transfer due to the adhesive spread over a larger area. And finally, Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs) are performed numerically for unreinforced and reinforced metal substrate with crack length of 1, 5 and 10 mm with metal and composite doublers under riveted and bonded configuration. For crack of 10 mm, 35% reduction in SIFs is observed for reinforced substrate with bonded metal or composite doublers compared to unreinforced cracked substrate.