Abstract
This paper focuses on the cracks repair of A5083 aluminum alloy widely used in marine structures. Indeed, these latter are under continuous high loadings which, with time, cause fatigue of the material and finally damage and crack propagation. Composite patches play an important role in repairing damaged structures by cracking in order to restore them as much as possible to their original operating state. In this study, we compare performance and efficiency between two patches made in carbon-epoxy and boron-epoxy with four different shapes: circular, rectangular, trapezoidal and elliptic. The loading and crack lengths effects on the performance of these patches were also studied. This numerical investigation was carried out to highlight the evolution of the J-integral as a function of the applied load, the geometrical shape of the patch and the crack length for both types of composites. According to the obtained results the best performance for the improvement of crack propagation resistance in aluminum alloy marine structures was achieved by using a circular patch in boron-epoxy.