Blunt Notch Strength of AA2024 3-3/2-0.4 Fibre Metal Laminate Under Biaxial Tensile Loading

Fibre metal laminates are utilized in lightweight structures, such as aircraft fuselages, as fibre metal laminates provide outstanding fatigue and damage tolerance capabilities, together with a reduced weight compared to monolithic metallic structures. One critical feature of fuselage structures is their strength reduction that owes to riveting, i.e., a state-of-the-art joining technique in aircrafts. In the present work, the blunt notch strength of fibre-laminate panels with rivet holes is investigated under service-relevant biaxial loading conditions. To this purpose, cruciform specimens with a five-hole pattern were produced. These specimens were tested under various biaxiality ratios and fibre orientations. All tests were supported by three-dimensional digital image correlation to obtain the deformation field in the gauge area. Moreover, the displacement fields obtained during deformation were used in an elasto-plastic finite element model as boundary conditions to determine the maximum strains in the vicinity of the blunt notch holes and thus extend the application of the experimental results. The asymmetric strain fields obtained by digital image correlation reveal the interaction of the fibres with the blunt notch holes. Finally, it is shown that the biaxial loading conditions do not significantly influence the blunt notch strength.