INVESTIGATION OF FRACTURE PREVENTION EFFECTS OF COMPOSITE PATCHES REPAIR ON CRACKED ALUMINUM PLATES EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY

Abstract

Nowadays, composite materials are extensively applicable in various aspects including automotive, marine and most importantly aeronautical engineering because of their excellent characteristics. Innovative maintenance using materials with extraordinary features has led to contributing of composites with the goal of extending their lives services. Glass-epoxy composites are lifesaver, inexpensive and highly practical for repairing the damaged components of aeronautical structures. The present study has employed composite patching technique to repair 50 centrally cracked rectangular aluminum plates subjected uniaxial tensile loading experiment. The 600 KN Santam testing machine used for performing tensile tests. Then, the force-displacement linear graph for each sample was plotted and monitored by its user’s software. Next, the Abaqus finite element software simulated the same testing conditions on developed 3D- models using XFEM method. Finally, the numerical and experimental results indicated 0.0266 error percentage between the real and simulated tensile loading tests. In addition, specimens repaired by composite patches whose glass fibers orientations angles are 0,90 proved to have the best optimum performance while those that were repaired by patches with fiber orientations angle -45, +45 had the maximum displacement extension before failure.