A study on prognostic analysis of attachment lugs under off-axis loading

Lug joints with fasteners play a crucial role in connecting many major components of the aircraft. Most of the failures in the past were credited to the damages initiating and progressing from these types of joints. Ensuring the structural integrity of these fastener joints is a major issue in many engineering structures, especially in aerospace components, which would otherwise lead to fatal failure. The purpose of this paper is to adopting the prognostic approach for analysing these lug joints with fasteners subjected to off-axis loading by estimating the crack initiation and crack growth life of these joints. This data will be useful to estimate the remaining life of these joints at any given stage of operations, which is mandatory in structural health monitoring (SHM).

Straight and tapered lug joints are modelled using the finite element method in MSC PATRAN and analysed in MSC NASTRAN. These lug joints are analysed with a push fit fastener. The contact/separation regions at the pin–lug interface are carefully monitored throughout the analysis for various loading conditions. Critical locations in these lug joints are identified through stress analysis. Fatigue crack initiation and fatigue crack growth analysed is carried out at these locations for different load ratios. A computational method is proposed to estimate the cycles to reach crack initiation and cycles at which the crack in the lug joint become critical by integrating several known techniques.

Analysis carried out in this paper describes the importance of tapered lug joints, particularly when subjected to non-conventional way of loading, i.e. off-axis loading. There is a partial loss of contact between pin and lug upon pin loading, and this does not change further with monotonically increasing pin load. But during load reversals, there is a change in contact/separation regions which is effectively handled by inequality constraints in the boundary conditions. Crack growth in these lug joints pertains to mixed-mode cracking and is computed through the MVCCI technique.

Most of the earlier works were carried out on in-plane pin loading along the axis of symmetry of the lug. The current work considers the off-axis pin loading by loading the lug joints with transverse and oblique pin load. The significance of taper angle under such loading condition is brought in this paper. The results obtained in this paper through prognostic approach are of direct relevance to the SHM and damage tolerance design approach where the safety of the structural components is of foremost priority.