Helicopter Airframe Fatigue Spectra Generation

Helicopter airframe fatigue cracking is a cause of significant and growing cost of ownership and operational readiness concerns for the operators of (primarily) metallic airframe helicopters. Airframe fatigue has often had relatively low priority for helicopters, with research and design concentrated on the fatigue of flight critical rotating structural components such as rotor blades and pitch links. The Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) and the US Naval Air Systems Command are collaborating to develop improved methods and technologies that can be used to assess the fatigue damage endured by ageing helicopter airframes. The flight load sequencesor fatigue spectraexperienced by a helicopter airframe in its lifetime contain many billions of load cycles due to rotor revolutions. Fatigue spectra developed for helicopter airframe certification tests are heavily simplified for reasons such as computational efficiency, test practicality and cost. Real airframe fatigue spectra are likely to be influenced by the modes of vibration that might be present on the airframe, the attenuation of the vibratory loading that is introduced at the main and tail rotors and the relative magnitudes and influences of both quasi-static (manoeuvre induced) and vibratory loading. To better capture such complexity, more realistic, higher fidelity fatigue spectra are required. Fatigue spectra generation involves creating realistic flight-by-flight sequences of flight conditions and assigning high-fidelity flight loads data to those sequences. This paper details DSTOs development of a novel computer-automated process which pseudo-randomly generates realistic sequences of flight conditions to match a known or assumed usage spectrum.