Shear Stress Distribution in a Fuselage of an Aircraft

Abstract

The aircraft is assembled from basic components like fuselages, control surfaces, wings, and tail units. These components vary in different aircraft and have more than one specific function. The structure of an aircraft is designed to withstand two different types of loads namely the ground loads which includes landing loads, taxiing load, hoisting, and towing load. Air load is the second type which includes loads acting on the structure during flight by maneuvers and gusts. These two classes of load can be subdivided into surface forces which acts on the surface of the structure like hydrostatic pressure and aerodynamics, and body forces which is produced by inertia and gravitational effects and acts over the volume of the structure. The impact of these air loads results in bending stresses, shear stresses and torsional loads in all parts of the structure of the aircraft. The purpose of this paper is to calculate and plot the shear stress distribution as function of “a”  on a cross section of an airplane fuselage made of 2014-T4 aluminum alloy. The plate thickness is 0.175a mm which is constant around the periphery and an applied torque of 200 kN.m. The radii of the fuselage are 50a mm and 32a mm respectively and it has a height of 69.5a mm. The fuselage is divided into sectors and triangles and their areas calculated. The shear flow which is a product of shear stress and thickness of the fuselage can be calculated. From the result it can be observed that as the magnitude of “a” increases the shear stress reduces. Verification and validation were carried out on solid works to test for convergence.

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