Fracture Analysis for Stiffened Aircraft Fuselage Using Substructure Method

This paper primarily describes the development and application of substructure computational analysis techniques in two-step hirarchical strategy to determine stress intensity factors for the stiffened damaged panels subjected to fatigue internal pressure. A program based on substructure analysis technique and global-local hierarchical strategy has been developed for the fracture analysis of curved aircraft panels containing cracks. This program may create superelements in global and local models, and obtain fracture parameter of the crack in local model by expanding results in superelements automatically. The technique is applied to the analysis of a cracked panel with 7 frames and 10 stringers. SIFs of four cracks in it with different crack lengths are obtained efficiently.