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Skin Panel Bending References - Anything beyond Roark's?

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wsimpso1

Super Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Oct 18, 2003
Messages
11,358
Location
Saline Michigan
I am feeling like a voice in the wilderness. I have talked about bending loads on airplane skins due to moving air outside and stationary or even pressurized air inside. I have found that Roark's has a number of equations for stress and deflections of flat plates, giving us a method for modeling. But try as I might, I can find nothing in airplane design texts and websites handling this issue at all. I have carefully pored through the table of contents in Bruhn and in Peery and Azar, then scanned the pertinent chapters. The authors talk about the skins carrying shear from torsion, tension and compression up to buckling from bending, methods of stiffening skins, rib design carrying loads from skin to spars, blah, blah, blah, but nowhere can I find anything that talks about air loads producing skin panel deflection and bending stresses. I know that significant stresses in the skins can be produced this way, which will set maximum panel sizes and/or minimum panel thickness for any given rib spacing.

Do any of us have any information, articles, etc, talking about this effect and how it is calculated other than the conservative approach of modeling flat panels. If you do, please hook us up with websites, .pdf's, etc.

Thanks so much,

Billski
 
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