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Concept
Damage tolerance
Summary
In engineering, damage tolerance is a property of a structure relating to its ability to sustain defects safely until repair can be effected. The approach to engineering design to account for damage tolerance is based on the assumption that flaws can exist in any structure and such flaws propagate with usage. This approach is commonly used in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and civil engineering to manage the extension of cracks in structure through the application of the principles of fracture mechanics. A structure is considered to be damage tolerant if a maintenance program has been implemented that will result in the detection and repair of accidental damage, corrosion and fatigue cracking before such damage reduces the residual strength of the structure below an acceptable limit.
Structures upon which human life depends have long been recognized as needing an element of fail-safety. When describing his flying machine, Leonardo da Vinci noted that "In constructing wings one should make one chord to bear the strain and a looser one in the same position so that if one breaks under the strain, the other is in the position to serve the same function."
Prior to the 1970s, the prevailing engineering philosophy of aircraft structures was to ensure that airworthiness was maintained with a single part broken, a redundancy requirement known as fail-safety. However, advances in fracture mechanics, along with infamous catastrophic fatigue failures such as those in the de Havilland Comet prompted a change in requirements for aircraft. It was discovered that a phenomenon known as multiple-site damage could cause many small cracks in the structure, which grow slowly by themselves, to join one another over time, creating a much larger crack, and significantly reducing the expected time until failure
Not all structure must demonstrate detectable crack propagation to ensure safety of operation.
Official source
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