Università Roma Tre

The Aircraft Structures course is part of the activities of the Construction and aerospace structures (ING-IND/04 SSD).

The teaching program is structured to provide students with knowledge and skills in the structural design of aeronautical components, using methods widely used in the aircraft conceptual and preliminary design phases.

The teaching program is divided into 36 lectures (equal to 9 CFU) divided into the following five main sections:

1) Beam theory: a review of bidirectional bending, torsion, and shear of open and closed thin-walled beams. Torsion and shear in multicell thin-walled beams, and tapered beams.

2) Introduction to aircraft design and semi-monocoque structures: loads acting on aircraft, regulations for aircraft design, box-wing concept, fuselage structure, fuselage, box-wing stress and strain analysis, and structural idealization.

3) Thin plates Kirchhoff's theory: in-plane problem, bending problem, eigenfunctions method for simply-supported plates.

4) Introduction to structural instability: buckling of the beam (Euler's critical load); buckling of thin plates; buckling on aeronautical structures.

5) Thin shells: shells in the form of a surface of revolution and loaded symmetrically with respect to their axis, pressurized fuselage stress analysis.

- T.H.G. Megson, Aircraft Structures for Engineering Students, Arnold, London, 1999 (for contents 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the syllabus)

- C.T. Sun, Mechanics of Aircraft Structures, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1998 (for contents 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the syllabus)

- S.P. Timoshenko, Theory of Plates and Shells, McGraw-hill, 1959 (for contents 3 and 5 of the syllabus)

- Lectures notes by the teacher (for all the contents of the syllabus)

The educational material used by the teacher from time to time is indicated during lectures. The lecture notes are available on the Moodle platform to facilitate their use for attending and non-attending students. On the same platform, are also made available the specifications of the project the students have to perform during the year, as well as a collection of written tests of previous exams, to provide students with a valid and realistic test bench for the final exam.