Glare at Politecnico di Milano: Experiments and Computations

This work presents the experimental and numerical activities performed at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale of Politecnico di Milano with respect to Glare. Glare represents indeed a promising material to manufacture aircraft structural parts when fatigue, damage tolerance and impacts are of primary concern. The paper reports some preliminary results regarding the stiffness, the strength and the impact response of Glare, as well as its peculiar joint technology: the splicing technique. The subsequent activities have been focused on the numerical-experimental investigation of the bucking behaviour of Glare. In this within, a Wagner's web is used. Buckling and post-buckling analyses are performed by using implicit and explicit finite element analyses. An elastic-plastic law was adopted for the aluminium alloy layers of Glare while an elastic model was used for the fibreglass layers. The experiments carried out on the Wagner's web result in good agreement with the numerical computations. Finally, the limits of adopting an elastic model for fibreglass layers are discussed and a constitutive law to model the in-plane inelastic response of Glare is proposed. The theoretical aspects and the calibration of the model are presented and compared with experimental tests. The numerical-experimental correlation proves the reliability of the proposed law, as far as the in-plane inelastic behaviour of Glare is concerned.