Fuselage Stress Analysis

1. The fuselage of an aircraft must be heated, ventilated and pressurized to provide the necessary safety to the passengers. 2. The fuselage should also shield the passengers from excessive noise and vibration. 3. Furthermore, efficient, restful and attractive furnishings must be provided.

Loads
1. When compared to the wing, the fuselage is subjected to relatively small surface forces. The fuselage is subjected to large concentrated forces such as the wing reactions, landing gear reactions, empennage reactions, etc. 2. In addition, the fuselage houses many items of various sizes and weights which therefore subject the fuselage to large inertia forces. 3. Also because of high-altitude flight, the fuselage must withstand cabin pressurization loads. To handle these internal pressures efficiently, requires a circular cross-section fuselage or a combination of circular elements.

Structure of the fuselage

1. The basic fuselage structure is essentially a single cell thin-walled tube with many transverse frames (or rings or bulkheads) and longitudinal stringers to provide a combined structure which can absorb and transmit the concentrated and distributed loads safely and efficiently. 2. The fuselage is also a beam structure subjected to axial, bending and torsional loads. The ideal fuselage structure should be one without any cut-outs or discontinuities; however, practical fuselage structure has many cut-outs.

Stress Analysis Methods Effective Cross-Section

1. It is common practice to use the simplified beam theory in calculating the stresses in the skin and stringers of a fuselage structure. 2. If the fuselage is pressurized, the internal pressure loads should also be included. 3. In fuselages, the skin in curved. The curves sheet panels have a higher critical

compressive buckling stress than flat panels of the same size and thickness. 4. In small airplanes, the radius of curvature of the fuselage skin is relatively small which gives a much higher buckling strength.

A distributed stringer type of fuselage section is shown below. Assume that the external loads are applied which provide bending of the beam about the z-axis with compression on the upper portion of the cell.

Up to the point of buckling of the curved sheet between the stringers, all the material in the beam section can be considered fully effective. The bending stresses can be computed from the general flexural formula =

Mzy Iz

When a curved sheet between the stringers buckles, the stresses are redistributed on the section as a whole. The ultimate compressive strength of a curved sheet with stringers can be approximated by the following two assumptions 1. A small width ( w1 ) of sheet is considered as carrying the same compressive stress as the stringer. 2. The remainder of the curved sheet between stringers, namely b ( w1 + w2 ) carries a

t maximum compressive stress cr = 0.3E . r

The thin curved skin between the stringers normally buckles under a compressive stress far below the buckling strength of the stringer. Hence the curved sheet is treated as an element with varying effective thickness. The effective thickness depends on the ratio of the curved sheet buckling stress cr to the bending stress b existing at that point for bending of the

fuselage section. Hence the effective sheet thickness for the curved sheet panels can be written as te = t Or an effective area can be written as Ae = bt

cr b

cr b

Where b is the width of the curved sheet between the effective sheet widths w1 , w2 ,etc.
Procedure

Let the design moment about z-axis is Mo N-m. Zee stringers, d1 mm deep and with
B B B B

sufficient area Astringer be used. The ultimate compressive strength of the zee stringer plus its
B B

effective skin and a length equal to fuselage frame spacing is comp MPa. The skin thickness may be assumed to be t and the material used is Aluminum alloy with E = 70 GPa. The fuselage stringers are to be symmetrical about the section center line. The first step is to determine approximately how many zee stringers will be required. The internal resisting moment must equal the external bending moment. Using this condition, the total area Ac for the compressive side of the fuselage section can be obtained. Part of the total
B B

area is provided by the effective skin area. The effective width to use with each rivet line equals w = Ct
E

st

. We will take C = 1.7 which a commonly used value. From this formula

sheet effective width w and hence the sheet thickness t can be found. A preliminary value of w = 40t can be taken as a starting value. Due to the applied bending moment, the skin on the lower half of the fuselage is in tension and therefore fully effective and so the neutral axis will fall below the center line.