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Fatigue of the pressurized fuselages of transport aircraft is a significant safety problem in aviation. This volume focuses on the phenomenon of fatigue in riveted fuselage lap joints, which have the potential to cause cracks leading to catastrophic failure.

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Fatigue of the pressurized fuselages of transport aircraft is a significant problem all builders and users of aircraft have to cope with for reasons associated with assuring a sufficient lifetime and safety, and formulating adequate inspection procedures. These aspects are all addressed in various formal protocols for creating and maintaining airworthiness, including damage tolerance considerations. In most transport aircraft, fatigue occurs in lap joints, sometimes leading to circumstances that threaten safety in critical ways. The problem of fatigue of lap joints has been considerably enlarged by the goal of extending aircraft lifetimes.

Fatigue of riveted lap joints between aluminium alloy sheets, typical of the pressurized aircraft fuselage, is the major topic of the present book. The richly illustrated and well-structured chapters treat subjects such as: structural design solutions and loading conditions for fuselage skin joints; relevance of laboratory test results for simple lap joint specimens to riveted joints in a real structure; effect of various production and design related variables on the riveted joint fatigue behaviour; analytical and experimental results on load transmission in mechanically fastened lap joints; theoretical and experimental analysis of secondary bending and its implications for riveted joint fatigue performance; nucleation and shape development of fatigue cracks in riveted longitudinal lap joints; overview of experimental investigations into the multi-site damage for full scale fuselage panels and riveted lap joint specimens; fatigue crack growth and fatigue life prediction methodology for riveted lap joints; residual strength predictions for riveted lap joints in a fuselage structure. The major issues of each chapter are recapitulated in the last section.

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From the reviews:

"This is a book dealing with the practical engineering problem as to how to successfully design riveted fuselage lap-joints, as well as how to perform simple and advanced analyses to substantiate the design. I believe that this book is an essential reference for aircraft designers as well as for fatigue analysts that will need to substantiate the design for adequate fatigue life and for selecting meaningful inspections for cracks." (Abraham Brot, Israel Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics, October, 2013)
"The authors have collected and analysed numerous older and more recent reports, papers, and doctoral theses associated with fatigue of riveted lap joints. ... The book with over 300 pages is amply provided with instructive figures. Whenever fatigue of lap joints must be considered for designing a fuselage or analysing fatigue in lap joints of existing aircraft, this book should be consulted. There is no comparable book with such a comprehensive and explanatory description of fatigue of riveted lap joint." (Jaap Schijve, International Journal of Fatigue, Vol. 51, 2013)

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