A CFRP Passenger Floor Stanchion Underwent Dynamic Buckling Structural Testing

Abstract

The work focuses on the study of the structural behaviour of a composite floor beam in the cargo area of a commercial aircraft subjected to static and dynamic loads (typical of hard or crash landing). Experimental tests have been performed in the laboratories of the Dept. of Industrial Engineering (UniNA) jointly with the development of numerical models suitable to correctly simulate the phenomenon through the LS-DYNA software. The definition of a robust numerical model allowed to evaluate the possibility of buckling triggering. The test article was equipped with potting supports on both ends of the tested beam, filling the pots with epoxy resin toughened with glass fiber nanoparticles. This allowed to uniformly load the beam ends in compression and to carry out the tests loading the specimen statically and dynamically, to observe the differences in the behaviour of the beam under two different types of applied load. The comparison between the numerical and the experimental results shows that the dynamic buckling was triggered by a quantitatively smaller load than in the static case. On the other hand, it is observed this phenomenon to postpone the failure of the structure, due to the significantly higher displacement with respect to the quasi-static case to reach that condition.