Research on High Strength Aluminum Alloys Components Stress Analysis by Lock-In Thermography

Abstract

This paper describes a theoretical and experimental analysis on full-filed stress distribution from thermoelastic measurements and its application to determination of stress concentration. The sum of the principal stress can be measured by Thermal Stress Analysis (TSA). Lock-in Thermography has been applied to measure the sum of principal stress distribution of component structure by its high thermal resolving. In this study, Finite element method is used to calculate the sum of principal stress distribution, and the thermoelastic effect model is developed to study the relationship between the temperature deviation and the applied stress in an elastic material. Experiments were carried out with ANSI 7071 high strength aluminum alloys ply and ones with a crack under cyclic load. The thermoelastic constant is obtained for ANSI 7071 high strength aluminum alloys materials. The stress concentration factor is calculated for a ply with modeling crack under the condition of different loads. The experiment was carried out with high strength aluminum alloys component structure with rivet joints. The experimental results show the stress distribution can be measured and analyzed the contact stress distribution between ply and rivet by using Lock-in thermography. It was found that the structure stress can be evaluated with good accuracies by the lock in thermography.