Hybrid displacement FE formulations including a hole

The paper deals with the problem related to the modelling of riveted assemblies for crashworthiness analysis of full-scale complete aircraft structures. Comparisons between experiments and standard FE computations on high-energy accidental situations onto aluminium riveted panels show that macroscopic plastic strains are not sufficiently localised in the FE shells connected to rivet elements. The main reason is related to the structural embrittlement caused by holes, which are currently not modelled. Consequently, standard displacement FE models do not succeed in initialising and propagating the rupture in sheet metal plates and along rivet rows as observed in the experiments. However, the literature survey show that it is possible to formulate super-elements featuring defects that both give accurate singular strain fields and are compatible with standard displacement finite elements. These super-elements can be related to the displacement model of the hybrid-Trefftz principle of the finite element method, which is a kind of domain decomposition method. A feature of hybrid-Trefftz finite elements is that they are mainly used for elastic computations. It is thus proposed to investigate the possibility of formulating a hybrid displacement finite element, including the effects of a hole, dedicated to crashworthiness analysis of fullscale aeronautic structures.