Fuselage Stress Analysis

1. The fuselage of an aircraft must be heated, ventilated and pressurized to provide the
necessary safety to the passengers.
2. The fuselage should also shield the passengers from excessive noise and vibration.
3. Furthermore, efficient, restful and attractive furnishings must be provided.

Loads
1. When compared to the wing, the fuselage is subjected to relatively small surface forces.
The fuselage is subjected to large concentrated forces such as the wing reactions, landing
gear reactions, empennage reactions, etc.
2. In addition, the fuselage houses many items of various sizes and weights which therefore
subject the fuselage to large inertia forces.
3. Also because of high-altitude flight, the fuselage must withstand cabin pressurization
loads. To handle these internal pressures efficiently, requires a circular cross-section
fuselage or a combination of circular elements.

Structure of the fuselage

1. The basic fuselage structure is essentially a single cell thin-walled tube with many
transverse frames (or rings or bulkheads) and longitudinal stringers to provide a combined
structure which can absorb and transmit the concentrated and distributed loads safely and
efficiently.
2. The fuselage is also a beam structure subjected to axial, bending and torsional loads. The
ideal fuselage structure should be one without any cut-outs or discontinuities; however,
practical fuselage structure has many cut-outs.

Stress Analysis Methods – Effective Cross-Section

1. It is common practice to use the simplified beam theory in calculating the stresses in the
skin and stringers of a fuselage structure.
2. If the fuselage is pressurized, the internal pressure loads should also be included.
3. In fuselages, the skin in curved. The curves sheet panels have a higher critical
compressive buckling stress than flat panels of the same size and thickness.
4. In small airplanes, the radius of curvature of the fuselage skin is relatively small which
gives a much higher buckling strength.
A distributed stringer type of fuselage section is shown below. Assume that the external
loads are applied which provide bending of the beam about the z-axis with compression on
the upper portion of the cell.

Up to the point of buckling of the curved sheet between the stringers, all the material in the
beam section can be considered fully effective. The bending stresses can be computed from
Mzy
the general flexural formula σ =
Iz
When a curved sheet between the stringers buckles, the stresses are redistributed on the
section as a whole. The ultimate compressive strength of a curved sheet with stringers can be
approximated by the following two assumptions
1. A small width ( w1 ) of sheet is considered as carrying the same compressive stress as the

stringer.
2. The remainder of the curved sheet between stringers, namely b − ( w1 + w2 ) carries a

t
maximum compressive stress σ cr = 0.3E .
r

The thin curved skin between the stringers normally buckles under a compressive stress far
below the buckling strength of the stringer. Hence the curved sheet is treated as an element
with varying effective thickness. The effective thickness depends on the ratio of the curved
sheet buckling stress σ cr to the bending stress σ b existing at that point for bending of the
fuselage section. Hence the effective sheet thickness for the curved sheet panels can be
written as

σ cr
te = t
σb
Or an effective area can be written as

σ cr
Ae = b′t
σb
Where b′ is the width of the curved sheet between the effective sheet widths w1 , w2 ,etc.

Procedure
Let the design moment about z-axis is Mo N-m. Zee stringers, d1 mm deep and with
B B B B

sufficient area Astringer be used. The ultimate compressive strength of the zee stringer plus its
B B

effective skin and a length equal to fuselage frame spacing is σ comp MPa. The skin thickness

may be assumed to be t and the material used is Aluminum alloy with E = 70 GPa. The
fuselage stringers are to be symmetrical about the section center line.
The first step is to determine approximately how many zee stringers will be required. The
internal resisting moment must equal the external bending moment. Using this condition, the
total area Ac for the compressive side of the fuselage section can be obtained. Part of the total
B B

area is provided by the effective skin area. The effective width to use with each rivet line

E
equals w = Ct . We will take C = 1.7 which a commonly used value. From this formula
σ st
sheet effective width w and hence the sheet thickness t can be found. A preliminary value of
w = 40t can be taken as a starting value.
Due to the applied bending moment, the skin on the lower half of the fuselage is in tension
and therefore fully effective and so the neutral axis will fall below the center line.