Static Structural Analysis of Fighter Aircraft's Wing Spars

Abstract

This study aims at describing a methodology for the Static Structural Analysis of Fighter Aircraft's wing spars for identification of critical stresses. Aircraft's wing is subjected to various flight loads i.e. bending loads, twisting loads, shear stress etc. This analysis helps to determine structural and material safety limit of aircraft's wing. Also, the location of critical stresses, that arises due to different loading actions on both wing and wing spars, can be determine. The failure of aircraft wing while performing different maneuvers like pulling g's can cause catastrophic results. Therefore, for safety concerns, different analysis was done on aircraft's wing. So, in this paper, bending stress, shear stress and von mises stress was calculated analytically and numerically for different loading conditions and then critical stresses were formulated and identified for failure or yielding points of wing spars. For ANSYS Simulation, CAD Models of wing and wing spars were imported in ANSYS workbench and static structural analysis was done to obtain critical stresses. Von Mises yield theory was used to formulate and identify critical stresses and yielding stresses. Numerical stress simulation was done in ANSYS and results for Von Mises Stress were obtained for different loading conditions. The results obtained from using both analytical calculation and numerical simulation were analyzed. Some of the ANSYS simulated results were exceeding beyond yield limit at some loading conditions and these exceeding results for both wing and spars were marked as critical stresses. The locations of these critical stresses were at attachment or fixed point of wing spars.