Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
As a result of the failure of parts of the airframe on several types of aircraft having high intensity acoustic environments, the military and civil certification authorities are requiring assurances that new designs have adequate strength to resist the acoustic loads. In most cases failures have been detected early enough to prevent serious impairment of the aircraft's structural strength. In some cases this has led to unsatisfactory maintenance and inspection requirements and there is also the possibility of more serious failures arising from the extension of undetected damage. The purpose of this paper is to review the test data available and to present a design procedure for structures in the region of high noise levels. As it is impractical to apply the full theoretical treatment in design because of computational complexity, an approximation is presented and the predicted results are compared with the experimental values.