Estimation of warranty period for structural components of aircraft

Abstract

One of the most important problems in fatigue analysis and design of aircraft structures is the prediction of fatigue crack growth in service. Available in‐service inspection data for various types of aircraft indicate that the fatigue crack damage accumulation in service involves considerable statistical variability. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the minimum time to crack initiation (or warranty period) for a number of aircraft structural components, before which no cracks (that may be detected) in materials occur, based on the results of previous warranty period tests on the structural components in question. This problem is a special case of a general class of problems concerned with the analysis of fatigue crack damage accumulation in aircraft service. The technique proposed here for solving this problem emphasizes pivotal quantities relevant for obtaining ancillary statistics. Attention is restricted to invariant families of distributions. Numerical examples are given.

First Published Online: 14 Oct 2010