AIRFRAME STRESS ANALYSIS AND SIZING

Outline for Course

This course aims to provide a background of airframe sizing emphasizing practical applications of metallic airframe structures that combines the input from both material strength and hands-on design experience. A balance between theory and practical application in airframe structures, depends extensively on experimental or test data which must be correlated with theory to provide a analytical procedure.
The structural problems of an aircraft are mostly concerned with thin-sheets or shells that involve buckling and crippling characteristics in aircraft structural analysis. The selection of structural configurations and materials to optimize the best use to individual application is the most important issue to this course. A considerable amount of information and data for the metallic airframe sizing is presented in tables, charts and/or curves based on past experience and/or test results.
Another purpose of this course is to give airframe sizing a broad data and information gained from past experience and lessons learned in design of components that can be used to design a weight efficient structure with structural integrity.
Sizing methods is also aimed for those who need rough estimation to support aircraft structural design during the stage of preliminary airplane design.
In addition, engineer can use this quick method to check and ensure it is the right result or not from the output of a computer analysis (called black box analysis). Therefore, the sizing method in this course is to provide a quick-answer means to be used as a hand-calculation assisted merely by a desk-top engineering calculator. Numerical examples in practical use will be discussed to give students a real world feeling of how to achieve the most efficient and light weight structures.
The careful selection of structural configurations and materials which are combined to produce an economic design while also considering the effects of static, fatigue, fail-safe requirements, damage tolerance and repairability is the important issue in this course.

Prerequisites for Course

This course does require some basic knowledge of background of strength of material.