Riveted repairs

Abstract

For the repair of Glare skins it is important that the current repair methods and tooling for aluminium structures can be used in order to avoid an increase of the operational costs for airliners. It has been shown that Glare can be repaired with normal riveted repair procedures, which are described in the Structural Repair Manual (SRM) of existing aircraft. Workshop operations like drilling, cutting and deburring could be performed on Glare without any problems. The excellent fatigue properties of Glare provide the riveted repair on a Glare skin with very good damage tolerance properties. Fatigue cracks in the first rivet rows of a repair will only occur in one or two layers of the skin. Stresses can be transferred to other layers in the laminate. Depending on the Glare grade, the residual strength results were equal or better to identical repairs on aluminium structures, even when the fatigue loading was performed at a much higher stress level.

The repair of a Glare stringer could also be performed according to an existing SRM. Again, all normal operations, which were also performed on the Glare skin repair, did not lead to problems when performed on a Glare stringer.