Innovative Approaches for the Flaw-Tolerant Design and Certification of Airframe Components

Fatigue life of airframe components is greatly influenced by many intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The nature of wide scattering in fatigue life makes it very difficult to design a component against fatigue failure. The huge consequences of life and property loss associated with premature fatigue failure therefore push airframe design toward over conservativeness. It is very desirable for airframe industry to have access to an analysis methodology that accurately and reliably treat material variability in the fatigue crack initiation and growth responses of aerospace structural alloys. The goal of the present SBIR project is to fulfill these critical needs by developing a physics-based computational methodology capable of predicting the stochastic nature of fatigue life in airframe components.