With the increasing complexity of aircraft structures and materials there is an essential need to continually monitor the structure for damage. This also drives the requirement for optimizing the location of sensors for damage detection to ensure full damage detection coverage of the structure whilst minimizing the number of sensors required, hence reducing costs, weight and data processing. An...

In an unpredictable world where human intervention or unexpected environmental conditions can prevail, damage can occur to manmade structures. Whilst structural design allows for redundancy, or a structural capability beyond the general working load of the structure, it is necessary to be able to analyse and understand the residual capability of a damaged structure to ensure the safety of perso...

The dermis of sea cucumbers is a catch connective tissue or mutable collagenous tissue that shows large changes in stiffness. Extensive studies on the dermis revealed that it can adopt three different states having different mechanical properties that can be reversibly converted. These are the stiff, standard and soft states. The standard state is readily produced when a dermal piece is immerse...

This paper proposes a hybrid WAAM (wire arc additive manufacturing) and milling process (HWMP), and highlights its application in the fabrication of stiffened panels that have wide applications in aviation, aerospace, and automotive industries, etc. due to their light weight and strong load-bearing capability. In contrast to existing joining or machining methods, HWMP only deposits stiffeners l...

For the lightly-loaded structures (200 lbs/in. in compression and 400 lbs/in. in shear), the traditional skin-stiffened structure is more efficient than sandwich structure due to the minimum gage requirements imposed on the sandwich structure. A design for minimum weight and cost Tstiffened panel that was designed for a 120 lbs/in. compression load and 337 lbs./in. shear loading condition is pr...

European aircraft industry demands for reduced development and operating costs, by 20% and 50% in the short and long term, respectively. Contributions to this aim are provided by the completed project POSICOSS and the running follow-up project COCOMAT, both supported by the European Commission. As an important contribution to cost reduction a decrease in structural weight can be reached by expl...