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Technique computes stresses resulting from axisymmetric transient thermal loading in circular solid-propellant grain section with circular ports. Propellant is assumed to be linear, thermal rheologically simple, viscoelastic material; material properties are represented by exponential series in time.
The influence of inelastic material models on computed stress-strain states, and therefore predicted lives, was studied for thermomechanically loaded structures. Nonlinear structural analyses were performed on a fatigue specimen which had been subjected to thermal cycling in fluidized beds and on a mechanically load cycled benchmark notch specimen. Four incremental plasticity creep models (isotropic, kinematic, combined isotropic kinematic, combined plus transient creep) were exercised using the MARC program. Of the plasticity models, kinematic hardening gave results most consistent with experimental observations. Life predictions using the computed strain histories at the critical location with a strainrange partitioning approach considerably overpredicted the crack initiation life of the thermal fatigue specimen.
The influence of inelastic material models on computed stress-strain states, and therefore predicted lives, was studied for thermomechanically loaded structures. Nonlinear structural analyses were performed on a fatigue specimen which was subjected to thermal cycling in fluidized beds and on a mechanically load cycled benchmark notch specimen. Four incremental plasticity creep models (isotropic, kinematic, combined isotropic-kinematic, combined plus transient creep) were exercised. Of the plasticity models, kinematic hardening gave results most consistent with experimental observations. Life predictions using the computed strain histories at the critical location with a Strainrange Partitioning approach considerably overpredicted the crack initiation life of the thermal fatigue specimen.
Over the operational lifetime of both military and civil aircraft, structural components are exposed to hundreds of thousands of low-stress repetitive load cycles and less frequent but higher-stress transient loads originating from maneuvering flight and atmospheric gusts. Micro-material imperfections in the structure, such as cracks and debonded laminates, expand and grow in this environment, reducing the structural integrity and shortening the life of the airframe. Extreme costs associated with refurbishment of critical load-bearing structural components in a large fleet, or altogether reinventoring the fleet with newer models, indicate alternative solutions for life extension of the airframe structure are highly desirable. Increased levels of operational safety and reliability are also important factors influencing the desirability of such solutions. One area having significant potential for impacting crack growth/fatigue damage reduction and structural life extension is flight control. To modify the airframe response dynamics arising from command inputs and gust disturbances, feedback loops are routinely applied to vehicles. A dexterous flight control system architecture senses key vehicle motions and generates critical forces/moments at multiple points distributed throughout the airframe to elicit the desired motion characteristics. In principle, these same control loops can be utilized to influence the level of exposure to harmful loads during flight on structural components. Project objectives are to investigate and/or assess the leverage control has on reducing fatigue damage and enhancing long-term structural integrity, without degrading attitude control and trajectory guidance performance levels. In particular, efforts have focused on the effects inner loop control parameters and architectures have on fatigue damage rate. To complete this research, an actively controlled flexible aircraft model and a new state space modeling procedure for crack growth have been utilized. Analysis of the analytical state space model for crack growth revealed the critical mathematical factors, and hence the physical mechanism they represent, that influenced high rates of airframe crack growth. The crack model was then exercised with simple load inputs to uncover and expose key crack growth behavior. To characterize crack growth behavior, both "short-term" laboratory specimen test type inputs and "long-term" operational flight type inputs were considered. Harmonic loading with a single overload revealed typical exponential crack growth behavior until the overload application, after which time the crack growth was retarded for a period of time depending on the overload strength. An optimum overload strength was identified which leads to maximum retardation of crack growth. Harmonic loading with a repeated overload of varying strength and frequency again revealed an optimum overload trait for maximizing growth retardation. The optimum overload strength ratio lies near the range of 2 to 3 with dependency on frequency. Experimental data was found to correlate well with the analytical predictions.
At NASA/MSFC, Structural Dynamics personnel continue to perform advanced analysis for the turbomachinery in the J2X Rocket Engine, which is under consideration for the new Space Launch System. One of the most challenging analyses in the program is predicting turbine blade structural capability. Resonance was predicted by modal analysis, so comprehensive forced response analyses using high fidelity cyclic symmetric finite element models were initiated as required. Analysis methodologies up to this point have assumed the flow field could be fully described by a sector, so the loading on every blade would be identical as it travelled through it. However, in the J2X the CFD flow field varied over the 360 deg of a revolution because of the flow speeds and tortuous axial path. MSFC therefore developed a complex procedure using Nastran Dmap's and Matlab scripts to apply this circumferentially varying loading onto the cyclically symmetric structural models to produce accurate dynamic stresses for every blade on the disk. This procedure is coupled with static, spin, and thermal loading to produce high cycle fatigue safety factors resulting in much more accurate analytical assessments of the blades.
The successful development of sail architectures will require careful attention to a number of key issues including but not limited to material strength issues, stress conditions for the membrane, load interactions between membrane and structure, and membrane material planarity. Along with the inherent challenges of fabricating and handling very large membrane structures these issues will pose real challenges for the near-term development of practical sail technologies. SRS has developed innovative technologies that deal directly with the challenges of developing very large sail membranes. Some of these technologies include edge reinforcements and innovative reinforcement attachment techniques, production of flight durable sail materials of less than 2.5 micron thicknesses and large scale fabrication techniques. SRS has employed these technologies in several large 10 m demonstrators that have been delivered to LaRC for solar vacuum testing. Details of the design of this system will be discussed.
A comparative failure analysis is presented based on the application of quadratic and cubic forms of the tensor polynomial lamina strength criterion to various composite structural configurations in a plane stress state. Failure loads have been predicted for off-angle laminates under simple loading conditions and for symmetric-balanced laminates subject to varying degrees of biaxial tension, including configurations subject to multimode failures. Some experimental data are also provided to support these calculations. From these results, the necessity of employing a cubic strength criterion to accurately predict the failure of composite laminae is demonstrated.
The previously determined life prediction analysis based on an exponential crack-velocity formulation was examined using a variety of experimental data on advanced structural ceramics tested under constant stress and cyclic stress loading at ambient and elevated temperatures. The data fit to the relation between the time to failure and applied stress (or maximum applied stress in cyclic loading) was very reasonable for most of the materials studied. It was also found that life prediction for cyclic stress loading from data of constant stress loading in the exponential formulation was in good agreement with the experimental data, resulting in a similar degree of accuracy as compared with the power-law formulation. The major limitation in the exponential crack-velocity formulation, however, was that the inert strength of a material must be known a priori to evaluate the important slow-crack-growth (SCG) parameter n, a significant drawback as compared with the conventional power-law crack-velocity formulation.
Minimum-mass designs were obtained for insulated structural panels loaded by a general set of inplane forces and a time dependent temperature. Temperature and stress histories in the structure are given by closed-form solutions, and optimization of the insulation and structural thicknesses is performed by nonlinear mathematical programming techniques. Design calculations are described to evaluate the structural efficiency of eight materials under combined heating and mechanical loads: graphite/polyimide, graphite/epoxy, boron/aluminum, titanium, aluminum, Rene 41, carbon/carbon, and Lockalloy. The effect on design mass of intensity and duration of heating were assessed. Results indicate that an optimum structure may have a temperature response well below the recommended allowable temperature for the material.
The Dynamic Response Computation (DIRECT) computer program simulates vibrations induced in a complex structure by applied dynamic loads. Developed to enable rapid analysis of launch- and landing- induced vibrations and stresses in a space shuttle, DIRECT also can be used to analyze dynamic responses of other structures - for example, the response of a building to an earthquake, or the response of an oil-drilling platform and attached tanks to large ocean waves. For a space-shuttle simulation, the required input to DIRECT includes mathematical models of the space shuttle and its payloads, and a set of forcing functions that simulates launch and landing loads. DIRECT can accommodate multiple levels of payload attachment and substructure as well as nonlinear dynamic responses of structural interfaces. DIRECT combines the shuttle and payload models into a single structural model, to which the forcing functions are then applied. The resulting equations of motion are reduced to an optimum set and decoupled into a unique format for simulating dynamics. During the simulation, maximum vibrations, loads, and stresses are monitored and recorded for subsequent analysis to identify structural deficiencies in the shuttle and/or payloads.
A series of mechanical load tests was completed on several novel design concepts for extremely lightweight combustion chamber support structures at the NASA Glenn Research Center (http://www.nasa.gov/glenn/). The tests included compliance evaluation, preliminary proof loadings, high-strain cyclic testing, and finally residual strength testing of each design (see the photograph on the left). Loads were applied with single rollers (see the photograph on the right) or pressure plates (not shown) located midspan on each side to minimize the influence of contact stresses on corner deformation measurements. Where rollers alone were used, a more severe structural loading was produced than the corresponding equal-force pressure loading: the maximum transverse shear force existed over the entire length of each side, and the corner bending moments were greater than for a distributed (pressure) loading. Failure modes initiating at the corner only provided a qualitative indication of the performance limitations since the stress state was not identical to internal pressure. Configurations were tested at both room and elevated temperatures. Experimental results were used to evaluate analytical prediction tools and finite-element methodologies for future work, and they were essential to provide insight into the deformation at the corners. The tests also were used to assess fabrication and bonding details for the complicated structures. They will be used to further optimize the design of the support structures for weight performance and the efficacy of corner reinforcement.
A uniaxial approach was developed for calculating cyclic creep and stress relaxation at the critical location of a structure subjected to cyclic thermomechanical loading. This approach was incorporated into a simplified analytical procedure for predicting the stress-strain history at a crack initiation site for life prediction purposes. An elastic finite-element solution for the problem was used as input for the simplified procedure. The creep analysis includes a self-adaptive time incrementing scheme. Cumulative creep is the sum of the initial creep, the recovery from the stress relaxation and the incremental creep. The simplified analysis was exercised for four cases involving a benchmark notched plate problem. Comparisons were made with elastic-plastic-creep solutions for these cases using the MARC nonlinear finite-element computer code.
Structural alloys embody internal mechanisms that allow recovery of state with varying stress and elevated temperature, i.e., they can return to a softer state following periods of hardening. Such material behavior is known to strongly influence structural response under some important thermomechanical loadings, for example, that involving thermal ratchetting. The influence of dynamic and thermal recovery on the creep buckling of a column under variable loading is investigated. The column is taken as the idealized (Shanley) sandwich column. The constitutive model, unlike the commonly employed Norton creep model, incorporates a representation of both dynamic and thermal (state) recovery. The material parameters of the constitutive model are chosen to characterize Narloy Z, a representative copper alloy used in thrust nozzle liners of reusable rocket engines. Variable loading histories include rapid cyclic unloading/reloading sequences and intermittent reductions of load for extended periods of time; these are superimposed on a constant load. The calculated results show that state recovery significantly affects creep buckling under variable loading.
Structural alloys embody internal mechanisms that allow recovery of state with varying stress and elevated temperature, i.e., they can return to a softer state following periods of hardening. Such material behavior is known to strongly influence structural response under some important thermomechanical loadings, for example, that involving thermal ratchetting. The influence of dynamic and thermal recovery on the creep buckling of a column under variable loading is investigated. The column is taken as the idealized (Shanley) sandwich column. The constitutive model, unlike the commonly employed Norton creep model, incorporates a representation of both dynamic and thermal (state) recovery. The material parameters of the constitutive model are chosen to characterize Narloy Z, a representative copper alloy used in thrust nozzle liners of reusable rocket engines. Variable loading histories include rapid cyclic unloading/reloading sequences and intermittent reductions of load for extended periods of time; these are superimposed on a constant load. The calculated results show that state recovery significantly affects creep buckling under variable loading.
A simplified method called the transfer function technique (TFT) was devised for evaluating the stress wave environment in a structure containing internal equipment. The TFT consists of following the initial in-plane stress wave that propagates through a structure subjected to a dynamic load and characterizing how the wave is altered as it is transmitted through intersections of structural members. As a basis for evaluating the TFT, impact experiments and detailed stress wave analyses were performed for structures with two or three, or more members. Transfer functions that relate the wave transmitted through an intersection to the incident wave were deduced from the predicted wave response. By sequentially applying these transfer functions to a structure with several intersections, it was found that the environment produced by the initial stress wave propagating through the structure can be approximated well. The TFT can be used as a design tool or as an analytical tool to determine whether a more detailed wave analysis is warranted.
The rapid acceleration in materials discovery may overshadow the importance of thoroughly understanding the mechanical performance of newly developed materials in demanding environments. The recent interest in combining parametric studies with machine learning techniques to explore how changes in specific processing parameters or model inputs affect the overall behavior of a material system can only be truly beneficial if the governing constitutive relations describing material behavior are accurately established. In this study, we demonstrate the critical impact of accurately representing strut-level anisotropic material behavior in advanced stress analysis of additively manufactured lattice structures (AMLS). We introduce a systematic experimental and modeling approach for developing strut-level anisotropic elastoplastic material models that account for the influence of microstructural features such as porosity, texture, and surface roughness on the development of local anisotropic mechanical properties, which vary with strut orientation relative to the build direction (BD). As a result the presented material model captures and relates the statistics of spatially varying struts’ microstructural features to the local stress distribution. Our findings suggest that incorporating strut-level anisotropic material behavior into unit cell analysis significantly influences the load distribution and evolution of local stresses within the structure. Therefore, accounting for this anisotropy is critical for developing an understanding of unit cell behavior and performance, including subsequent topology/component design optimization based on this analysis.
This paper addresses the application of a formal optimization technique in rotorcraft airframe structural design studies to reduce the structural weight, to lower airframe vibrations, and to enhance fatigue life of the structure. Vibration and fatigue considerations in airframe design are described. An optimization methodology based on the use of a nonlinear programming technique to size airframe structural members subjected to constraints on weight, vibration response and fatigue stresses under dynamic loads, are described. The paper focuses on the development of necessary computational tools for airframe structural optimization and describes the sensitivity analysis procedure for these types of design constraints. Further, the paper describes the optimization procedure as implemented in a computer code called DYNOPT which is a unique operational combination of several newly developed Fortran codes as well as modification of existing codes consisting of the direct matrix abstraction modules of the MSC/NASTRAN Program and CONMIN optimizer. The application of the optimization procedure is demonstrated using an elastic-line model of the Bell AH-1G helicopter airframe structure and computational results are discussed.
The present paper describes an optimization capability for sizing airframe structures that are subjected to a combination of deterministic and random loads. Design constraints are implemented to prevent structural failure in fatigue and due to a single exceedance of the allowable stress. The random load is treated as a stationary, homogeneous process with a Gaussian probability distribution, and a frequency domain method is used for the computation of dynamic response parameters. An equal-probability-of-load-combination criterion is proposed in the formulation of strength constraints. This alleviates problems associated with the incomplete phase information available when using power spectral density methods. The optimization procedure is illustrated by examples using typical built-up structures.