Numerical and experimental research on fatigue life of aircraft structural joint

Fatigue analysis and optimal structural design of the fatigue-prone parts in the whole aircraft structures are significant for safety life and economy of aircrafts. In this paper, to get the fatigue life of an aircraft structural joint, the numerical simulation based on the large-scale general software ANSYS is processed to find the maximum local stress concentration and the related fatigue theory to estimate the fatigue life is discussed. Then, a series of fatigue experiments of the aircraft joint structure were carried out adopting the same fatigue cycle loads and environments with the computational case. The receivable relative error between the experimental and the numerical analysis results verify the computational efficiency. An improved scheme is presented to promote the fatigue life of the aircraft structural joint and verified to be efficient by the numerical analysis results.