Helicopter Airframe Fatigue Spectra Truncation and Verification

Abstract:

Helicopter airframe fatigue cracking is a cause of significant and growing cost of ownership and operational readiness concerns for the operators of (primarily) metallic airframe helicopters. Airframe fatigue has often had relatively low priority for helicopters, with research and design concentrated on the fatigue of flight critical rotating structural components such as rotor blades and pitch links. The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) and Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) of the US Navy are collaborating to develop improved methods and technologies that can be used to assess the fatigue damage accrued by ageing helicopter airframes. The flight load sequences, or fatigue spectra, experienced by a helicopter airframe in its lifetime contain many billions of load cycles due to rotor revolutions. The application of spectra containing such vast numbers of load cycles is often impractical for reasons of test duration and cost, therefore spectra simplification techniques must be employed. To this end, truncation is a technique that is used to eliminate non-or lesser-damaging load cycles, producing spectra equivalent in terms of theoretical fatigue damage but with substantially fewer load cycles. This paper describes several truncation techniques that have recently been developed at DSTO specifically to deal with the very large numbers of load cycles that are characteristic of helicopter airframe fatigue spectra. These techniques, which include both sequence and frequency based approaches, feature tunable levels of truncation and allow for large reductions in numbers of turning points while maintaining high-fidelity and realistic fatigue spectra. Also detailed are preliminary results from a comprehensive coupon test program, which DSTO is using to experimentally verify that truncated and un-truncated spectra are approximately equivalent in terms of the fatigue damage that they produce.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 891-892)
• Pages: 714-719
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.891-892.714
• Online since: March 2014
• Authors: John Vine, Luther Krake, Beau Krieg
• Keywords: Crack Growth Simulation, Fatigue, Helicopter, Spectrum, Testing, Truncation

References

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DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/amr.891-892.720

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