Analytical and experimental study of load attractions and fatigue crack growths in two-sided bonded repairs

With an increasing use of bonded composite patches for repairing fatigue and other damage on metallic aircraft structures, a research program under the sponsorship of the US Air Force Research Laboratory has been conducted for the advancement of this bonded composite technology. Through this research program, analytical methods for design and analysis of bonded patches have been developed and integrated into a PC-based computer code called CRAS (Composite Repair of Aircraft Structure) software. These analytical methods are reviewed briefly in this paper and they are validated with test results.