Fatigue Life Analysis of Holed Component in Aircraft Stuctures

Aircraft structure with holes was thought to have a significant impact towards fatigue
life. Holes had been stress concentrators where high magnitude of stress will be focused around
it and potentially be the fatigue crack imitation site. Stress and fatigue analysis were done
through finite element simulation to see the effect of stress concentration upon the fatigue life
of a plate-with-hole model. This model has been a simple representation of the complex holed
aircraft structures. It was found out that the result obtained was consistent to the assumptions
made where parts with stress concentration will have a shorter fatigue life due to the severity
of damage it face as cyclic loading is being applied to it. The current practice of fatigue life
prediction is usually through the process of full scale fatigue simulation which is a cost
intensive and a very time consuming process and through lab experiment which considerably
complicated and time consuming as well. This study had been focusing on creating a fatigue
life estimation that is simple and reliable. In this study, a method that highly focuses on the
usage of finite element software has been used and it was found out that the result is
convincingly simple and reliable with only 0.5% error.