Establishing Structural Repair Life by Means of Monte Carlo Simulation

Abstract. The purpose of this work is to incorporate the fatigue statistical scatter to the determination of fatigue life for repaired aircraft structures, by means of Monte Carlo simulation, opposed to traditional use of scatter factors. The results of the simulations indicated that even when a scatter factor of four is used for determination of a repair fatigue life, some unacceptable high probabilities of crack initiaion are still obtained. For this reason, it is recommended that a structural repair fatigue life be established based on an accumulated probability of crack initiation instead of simply using pre-defined scatter factors