FRACTURE TOUGHNESS ANALYSIS OF A CRACKEDCYLINDRICAL SHELL BONDED WITH A COMPOSITEPATCH

摘要

Adhesively bonded repair has been used as an efficient and economical method toextend the service life of cracked structural components. Most of the currently available analysis methodsand empirical databases for composite bonded repair to flat structures are computationally efficient andeasy to use. However, the current knowledge on composite bonded repair for flat structures cannot bedirectly applied to curved repairs. In this paper, a novel adhesive element developed by the authors inconjunction with a shell element is employed to investigate the fracture toughness at the crack tip of acracked cylindrical shell bonded with a composite patch. To validate of the present finite element modelfor curved composite patch repair, the stress intensity factors in a flat composite repair are firstlycomputed and compared with those available in the literature. For the curved repairs, a full 3-D finiteelement analysis is also conducted to validate the proposed numerical model. Some numerical examplesare given to demonstrate the effect of curvature on the fracture toughness of curved patch repairs.