Stress Analysis of Fuselage Stiffened Panel with and Without A Door Cutout

Abstract

Aircraft is a complex engineering structure. The safety of the structure and the weight of the structure are the two important aspects to be kept in mind while designing the aircraft structure. It is an uphill task for an aircraft structural designer to bring out a safest structure with minimum weight. The current project deals with the stress analysis of the fuselage-stiffened panel with and without a large cutout for an emergency exit door. Cabin pressurization load case, which is one of the critical load cases used for the stress analysis. When the aircraft is flying above 40000 ft. altitude pressure is applied to fuselage inside cabin to create sea level atmospheric pressure . Stress analysis of the fuselage segment will be carried out to capture the global response of the fuselage under pressurization. A skin panel with fuselage frame and stringers representing the fuselage features will be considered for the local analysis to capture global response. An emergency exit door cutout will be introduced in the stiffened panel and analyzed for stress distribution around the cutout. Stress concentration factor and variation of stress from cutout edge towards the free edge of the panel will be obtained from the stress analysis results. Key Words: Transport aircraft, Fuselage, Bulkhead, Orthogonal stiffening, Finite element method, stress analysis, emergency exit door cutout, Stress concentration factor