A Strain-Based Health Indicator for the SHM of Skin-to-Stringer Disbond Growth of Composite Stiffened Panels in Fatigue

Real-time Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of aeronautical structural components is a technology persistently investigated the last years by researchers and engineers to potentially reduce the cost and/or implementation of scheduled maintenance tasks. To this end, various types of sensors have been proposed to serve this role, e.g....

Towards the Certification of Bonded Primary Fiber Metal Laminate Structures by Bolted Disbond Arrest Features

A new certification approach for bonded primary Fiber Metal Laminate (FML) structures is investigated: using bolts as Disbond Arrest Features (DAF)s to contain the growth of bond line damages so that they can be found and repaired by inspection before becoming critical. By fatigue testing with coupon specimens and model analysis, it has been...

Fatigue disbond growth in primary aerospace structures

A parametric finite element model incorporating virtual crack closure technique was developed in order to determine the critical disbond size and location for disbond growth in an adhesively bonded skin stiffened structure, subjected to uniaxial compression loading. The model was validated using static experimental tests on both pristine and...

Towards Understanding Fatigue Disbond Growth via Cyclic Strain Energy

The concept of relating fatigue disbond growth to the strain energy release rate (SERR) is critically examined. It is highlighted that the common practise of using only the maximum SERR or only the SERR range is insufficient to correctly characterize a load cycle. As crack growth requires energy, it is argued that growth should be related to the...