A typical aircraft fuselage contains lap joints, which are overlapping regions of aluminum skins rivested together. In aging aircraft, a build-up of corrosion product between the skins causes out-of-plane bending, known as pillowing, that has bene shown to increase stress in the skins. Development of techniques to quantify the effect of the corrosion is supported by finite element analysis (FEA), and one method of verifying FEA through experiment is photoelastic analysis. To that end, two studies were performed to investigate the strain caused by pillowing.
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