Rib Flange Bending Methods

Abstract

Weight of aircraft structures plays a vital role in enhancing the business revenues of the manufacturers and end customers. Thus, the aircraft designers and manufacturers attempt to produce structures that are optimized for weight, cost, and at the same time serves the structural integrity, performance and safety requirements as specified by the certification agencies. One way to approach the problem of excess weight is to figure out the innovative analysis method, which predicts realistic failure modes and factors of safeties. In addition to this, care must be taken such that investment on analysis is under acceptable limits. As of today, most of the aerospace industry conservatively uses cantilever or fixed-fixed methods to check the adequacy of strength for rib flange bending for aircraft wings. This paper discusses various analysis methods to check rib flange bending and present a comparative study of the results and quantifies the amount of conservatism in each analysis approach through finite element method validation (FEMV). The methods discussed in this paper are usually not available in the optimization tools like FEA based software OptiStruct and NASTRAN. Eventually, this paper help the readers to identify the most preferred method for rib flange bending check, which is profitable from the point of view of optimization of weight, cost and robust structural integrity and least analysis time requirement.

Keywords: Weight, aircraft, static, flange bending, wing leading edge, track ribs and floor beams

Cite this Article

Ravindra Kiragi, Sundaresan Poovalingam, Ravikumar Subbaiah, Indradeep Bhadra. Rib Flange Bending Methods. Journal of Aerospace Engineering and Technology. 2016; 6(1): 24–38p.