Riveted Lap Joints in Aircraft Fuselage

Fatigue of the pressurized fuselages of transport aircraft is a significant problem for reasons associated with sufficient life time, safety and inspection. These aspects are addressed in airworthiness requirements including damage tolerance considerations. Fatigue of riveted lap joints is the major topic of the present book. Fatigue response of a riveted connection depends on the integrated effect of a large number of variables related to joint design and production and applied loading conditions. In view of that, numerous research programs on fatigue of riveted lap joints have been carried out and reported in the literature. §A characteristic and particularly dangerous form of the fatigue failure is the so-called multi-site damage (MSD) when small cracks initiated at the rivet holes grow and suddenly coalesce to form a single long crack, which can lead to the catastrophic failure. Of particular concern is MSD in aging transport aircraft. All above-mentioned issues are widely addressed in the present book.§The ten richly illustrated and well-structured chapters treat topics such as: structural design solutions for fuselage skin joints and the loading conditions; fatigue behaviour of riveted lap joints; production variables; dependence of the joint fatigue performance on various design parameters; analytical solution and experimental results on load transmission in lap joints with mechanical fasteners; implications of secondary bending for the joint fatigue performance; estimates of secondary bending by means of simple analytical models, FE computations and measurements; nucleation and shape development of fatigue cracks in longitudinal lap joints; an overview of experimental investigations into MSD; fatigue crack growth and fatigue life prediction methodology for riveted lap joints; and residual strength predictions for riveted lap joints in a fuselage structure.§