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Updated: Jul 5, 2025

Full-field Strain Measurements for Microstructurally Small Fatigue Crack Propagation Using Digital Image Correlation Method
Published on: January 16, 2019
Damage-Accumulation-Induced Crack Propagation and Fatigue Life Analysis of a Porous LY12 Aluminum Alloy Plate
Cheng Lv1,2, Kejie Wang1, Xiang Zhao1
1Bio-Inspired and Advanced Energy Research Center, School of Mechanics, Civil Engineering and Architecture, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710129, China.
Abstract:
Rivets are usually used to connect the skin of an aircraft with joints such as frames and stringers, so the skin of the connection part is a porous structure. During the service of the aircraft, cracks appear in some difficult-to-detect parts of the skin porous structure, which causes great difficulties in the service life prediction and health monitoring of the aircraft. In this paper, a secondary development subroutine in PYTHON based on ABAQUS-XFEM is compiled to analyze the cracks that are difficult to monitor in the porous structure of aircraft skin joints. The program can automatically analyze the stress intensity factor of the crack tip with different lengths in the porous structure, and then the residual fatigue life can be deduced. For the sake of safety, the program adopts a more conservative algorithm. In comparison with the physical fatigue test results, the fatigue life of the simulation results is 16% smaller. This project provides a feasible simulation method for fatigue life prediction of porous structures. It lays a foundation for the subsequent establishment of digital twins for damage monitoring of aircraft porous structures.
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