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Notes on the Strength of Stressed Skin Fuselages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Extract

With the growing popularity of the stressed skin or monocoque fuselage it is thought that the following notes may be of interest. There are many advantages in using stressed skin construction, but one reason against it in the past has been the difficulty in accurately calculating the strength of such structures. Sufficient information has now been accumulated, however, mainly from American sources, to enable the designer to obtain a fair idea of the strength of stressed skin structures, although the stresses occurring under any system of loads cannot be calculated at present with the same certainty as for the conventional braced structure. In the braced frame fuselage the loads are taken by struts and tie rods in tension and compression, but in the stressed skin fuselage they are taken as bending and shear loads in the skin. Once the ultimate tension and compression stresses are known for the material used, the strength of the struts and tie-rods for any system of braced structures is easily calculated. In the stressed skin structure, however, the ultimate stresses for the material are never realised over the whole structure, as failure invariably occurs through local buckling of the skin. The question is further complicated by the fact that the stress at which local failure will occur in sections built of thin plate varies with the design of the section, and two sections having the same area and same moment of inertia would not necessarily develop the same stress in bending.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1936

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References

Note on page No 305 * A summary of design formulae for beams having thin webs in diagonal tension, Paul Kuhn.

Note on page No 308 * Strength of rectangular fiat plates under edge compression. Louis Scthuman and Goldie Back.

Note on page No 309 * Comparison of three methods for calculating the compressive strength of flat and slightly curved sheets and stiffener combinations. Eugene E. Lundquist.