Preliminary Hybrid Joint Analysis for Aircraft Structures

Metal-composite joints, or hybrid joints are prevalent in aerospace structures due to their high strength and low weight. Such structures are usually found in areas where because of the load configuration, the use of composite materials is possible. Thereby, the analysis of such areas needs to consider both components, the metallic and the composite part. In this paper a hybrid joint is analyzed, consisting of a metallic stiffener, a multilayered honeycomb composite material, and joining fasteners, which constitute the joint between the isotropic and orthotropic materials. The present article has two main purposes: the first is to illustrate a pre-design procedure aimed to evaluate the load-carrying capability of a hybrid joint structure, thereby giving an estimate if the structure can withstand the given loading conditions; the second purpose is to present two types of finite element modeling techniques, one that captures the real geometric structure of the composite material and another which uses a simplified equivalent model, based on the desired level of evaluation of the composite material part. A comparison between the two models is made, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two forms of evaluations. For the metallic parts - stiffener and fasteners, both static and fatigue analyses were performed, as fatigue failure represents the common service failure mode for this type of structural components.