Advanced Design Concepts and Maintenance by Integrated Risk Evaluation for Aerostructures

This paper presents an overview of the achievements of a research and development project sponsored by the European Commission in the general area of Key Actions and New Perspectives in Aeronautics. The project was coordinated by Alenia and involved partners from major European Aircraft and Helicopter manufactures as well as research institutions and universities. The project was in support of EU policies on energy and environment, in addition to those on transport, economic and social cohesion, industry and, of course, research and technology. The overall objective of Advanced Design concepts and Maintenance by Integrated risk Evaluation for aerostructures (ADMIRE) was “to develop a probabilistic foundation for the application of damage tolerant design of metallic aircraft structures taking into account the innovative investigations on the initial flaw concept, crack growth evaluation improvements and residual strength in complex geometries”. The innovation provided by this project was the development of an overall approach capable of evaluating the damage tolerance of the structure on a probabilistic basis. This global risk analysis took into account the stochastic nature of structural parameters, their variation and their effects on the design and response properties of aircraft structural components, in order to estimate structural safety on a probabilistic basis while providing information on the confidence to be given to the predicted behavior. It also incorporated the investigations on the initial flaw concept, crack growth evaluation improvements and residual strength in complex geometries