Individual aircraft life monitoring: An engineering approach for fatigue damage evaluation

Individual aircraft life monitoring is required to ensure safety and economy of aircraft structure, and fatigue damage evaluation based on collected operational data of aircraft is an integral part of it. To improve the accuracy and facilitate the application, this paper proposes an engineering approach to evaluate fatigue damage and predict fatigue life for critical structures in fatigue monitoring. In this approach, traditional nominal stress method is applied to back calculate the S-N curve parameters of the realistic structure details based on full-scale fatigue test data. Then the S-N curve and Miner's rule are adopted in damage estimation and fatigue life analysis for critical locations under individual load spectra. The relationship between relative small crack length and fatigue life can also be predicted with this approach. Specimens of 7B04-T74 aluminum alloy and TA15M titanium alloy are fatigue tested under two types of load spectra, and there is a good agreement between the experimental results and analysis results. Furthermore, the issue concerning scatter factor in individual aircraft damage estimation is also discussed.