Towards understanding residual strength and damage evolution in damaged composite laminates

Fibre reinforced polymer composites have found increasing use in aircraft structures. This means that fleet managers need damage assessment tools for such materials, in order to decide on appropriate sustainment strategies. Developing such tools is hindered by the difficulty of generalising from lab tests to predict the behaviour of full-scale...

Compression after impact fatigue damage growth in CFRP – what does no-growth really mean?

Impacts on carbon fiber reinforced composites (CFRP) can produce a complex internal damage comprising multiple delaminations, which is hard to detect from visual inspection. This situation is known as barely visible impact damage (BVID). Considering that every airplane faces several impacts during its operational life, and that the majority of...

Topology Optimization for Damage Tolerance

Complex structural shapes can be produced with additive manufacturing. The geometrical complexity that can be achieved translates into an increase in possible designs. Designing these structures with traditional methods is difficult. A design process with computational optimization will enable engineers to use the geometrical freedom offered by...

Damage Tolerant Design for Additive Manufacturing: An experimental study on the fatigue behaviour of stretch dominated AlSi10Mg multiple load path specimens

To expand the use of additive manufacturing in aerospace towards more critical applications, it is required to design parts in a damage tolerant context. Therefore, the damage tolerance of additive manufactured multiple load path structures is assessed by analysing the fatigue life and damage propagation of components with increasing redundancy....

Fatigue crack growth in Selective Laser Melted Ti-6Al-4V

This research investigates the effect of a varying build orientation and different heat treatment on the crack propagation properties of SLM Ti-6Al-4V. Both crack propagation rate and direction are investigated. Fatigue tests are performed with a constant cyclic load and single edge notch specimens. Ten unique types of specimens were tested by...