VBA fatigue analysis program for metallic structural components preliminary design

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to describe the creation and use of a fatigue analysis program written in VBA, designed for the preliminary sizing of metallic structural components used in aerospace applications, subjected to one or multiple fatigue loading cases. The VBA programing language was chosen because of its direct control over the most common spreadsheet computational program, Microsoft Excel. Metal fatigue analysis is an important type of analyses for modern structures. Fatigue failure accounts for around 80-90 percent of common structural failures, and therefore, a quick and reliable analysis is necessary so as to evaluate the structure’s bearing capacity to fatigue load. Due to the nature of the fatigue load and the importance of the structural component, such an analysis can be very time consuming, starting from the finite element model preparation and going through the actual analysis; thus, there is a need for a tool that can evaluate the stress data from the numerical simulation and give reliable information about the behavior of the structural component.