Corrosion fatigue life prediction of aircraft structure based on fuzzy reliability approach

Material performance of LY12CZ aluminum is greatly degraded because of corrosion and corrosion fatigue, which severely affect the integrity and safety of aircraft structure, especially those of the navy aircraft structure. The corrosion and corrosion fatigue failure process of aircraft structure are directly concerned with many factors, such as load, material characteristics, corrosive environment and so on. The damage mechanism is very complicated, and there are both randomness and fuzziness in the failure process. With consideration of the limitation of those conventional probabilistic approaches for prediction of corrosion fatigue life of aircraft structure at present, and based on the operational load spectrum obtained through investigating service status of the aircraft in naval aviation force, a fuzzy reliability approach is proposed, which is more reasonable and closer to the fact. The effects of the pit aspect ratio, the crack aspect ratio and all fuzzy factors on corrosion fatigue life of aircraft structure are discussed. The results demonstrate that the approach can be applied to predict the corrosion fatigue life of aircraft structure.