Novel Experimental and Analytical Methods for Designing Damage Tolerant Composite Structures (MSC P9047)

Composite materials often represent the most weight efficient and lowest cost solutions for airframe structures. Many of these structures are in areas that are susceptible to incidental impact damage and require adequate residual strength after impact for specified periods of service. Current design methodologies require designers to predict the residual response of full-scale composite structures based on costly and time consuming small-scale tests and, methods for translating the response of standard damage tolerance characterization tests to reliable predictions of the damage tolerance of full-scale composite structures have not been demonstrated. Under this program, Materials Sciences Corporation will demonstrate the feasibility of using damage models to predict the impact and residual strength response of small-scale tests, thus laying the foundation for designing a test capable of capturing more complex failure modes associated with full-scale multi-bay composite airframe structures. Data generated under the Phase II demonstration and validation program will enable development of improved unified experimental methods and publication of a new damage tolerance test standard validated via round-robin testing. This effort will be led by our subcontractor on this program, Professor Dan Adams of the University of Utah. BENEFIT: Materials Sciences Corporation expects that this SBIR program will yield a methodology for simulating the damage tolerance response of composite structures that has been validated through comparison with experimental data. This validated methodology will enable a reduction in time and funding resources required to demonstrate that damage tolerance requirements have been met for military and commercial aircraft components.