Abstract
Bonded composite repair has been recognized as an efficient and economical method to extend the fatigue life of cracked aluminium components. In this work, the finite element method is applied to analyze the central crack's behaviour repaired by a boron/epoxy composite patch. The knowledge of the stress distribution in the neighbourhood of cracks has an importance for the analysis of their repair according to the patch geometry. The effects of mechanical and geometrical properties of the patch on the variation of the stress intensity factor at the crack tip were highlighted. The obtained results show that the stress intensity factor at the repaired crack with composite patch of height 2c/3 is reduced about 5% compared to cracks repaired with octagonal patch of size c. For patch height of c/3 the reduction is about 7%. The adhesive properties must be optimised in order to increase the repair performances and to avoid the adhesive failure. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.