STRUCTURAL MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE WING RIB USING FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

In recent years, Composite materials have received considerable attention as alternatives to steel and aluminum as structural materials in the construction, automotive, marine and aerospace industries due to a variety of reasons; these include a high strength-to-weight ratio, a high stiffness-to-weight ratio, corrosion and fatigue resistance, ease of handling, and ease of fabrication. Composite materials have been employed due to their life-cycle cost competitiveness. This research paper deals with the design and analysis of aircraft structural wing-rib using composite materials. The optimum design parameters for an aircraft structural wing-rib are suitably selected based on the classical approach. The three dimensional structural wing-rib is designed based on the design parameters using Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. The procedure of Finite Element Analysis and the detailed description about various Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools have been studied and implemented in this work. Designed three dimensional structural wing-ribs are exported to the CAE tool and Finite Element Modeling is prepared based on the design parameters. Composite Material properties and boundary conditions are executed with suitable conditions in CAE tool. Analysis is carried out for structural wing-ribs based on the various loading conditions and various fiber orientations of composite materials. A complete set of finite element analysis were conducted on different fiber oriented composite systems. Critical displacement and Stress tensor were obtained from Finite Element Tool. The results are compared based on the fiber orientation.