An experimental and numerical investigation on fatigue of composite and metal aircraft structures

The static strength and fatigue crack resistance of the aircraft skin structures depend on the materials used and joint type. Most of the commercial aircraft's skin panel structures are made from aluminium alloy and carbon fibre reinforced epoxy. In this study, the fatigue resistance of four joint configurations (metal/metal, metal/composite, composite/composite and composite/metal) with riveted, adhesive bonded, and hybrid joining techniques are investigated with experiments and finite element analysis. The fatigue tests were tension-tension because of the typical nature of the loads on aircraft skin panels susceptible of experimenting fatigue. Experiment results suggest that the fatigue life of hybrid joints is superior to adhesive bonded joints, and these in turn much better than conventional riveted joints. Thanks to the fact that, for hybrid joints, the adhesive bond provides better load distribution and ensures load-carrying capacity in the event of premature adhesive failure while rivets induce compressive residual stresses in the joint. Results from FE tool ABAQUS analysis for adhesive bonded and hybrid joints agrees with the experiments. From the analysis, the energy release rate for adhesive bonded joints is higher than that of hybrid joints in both opening (mode I) and shear direction (mode II). Most joints show higher energy release rate in mode II. This indicates that the joints experience fatigue crack in the shear direction, which is responsible for crack opening.