BEASY attended and exhibited at the recent 2012 Aircraft Airworthiness & Sustainability Conference in Baltimore. Tom Curtin and Dick Dippery presented the latest BEASY Software and Services for Crack Growth Simulation and Corrosion Management in Aircraft Structures.

Fracture Simulation

Figure 1 Initial ABAQUS model

A focus of interest was BEASY's Fatigue and Crack Growth software used to perform 3D crack growth simulations to support structural life extension decisions and in particular its integration with Finite Element systems such as ABAQUS, ANSYS, NASTRAN and MSC PATRAN. This was demonstrated in a failure investigation where an ABAQUS stress analysis model was available and BEASY was used to perform the crack growth study to gain an understanding of the failure mode.

Figure 2 The initial crack shape and stresses predicted by BEASY

The BEASY ABAQUS interface was used to convert the model into a form suitable for

BEASY and the BEASY fracture tools were used to define the crack location, fracture mechanics properties and the loading. The deformed shape and stresses are shown in the picture for the initial crack growth. The crack was then automatically grown using BEASY to predict the crack path and the critical crack size. 

Figure 4 Actual failure

Figure 3 Predicted crack path