Approach to correlate quality of rotorcraft composite components with structural performance

Major challenges of high quality requirements are associated with internal statistical variability, i.e., too severe gap between “as-designed” vs. “as-built” composite micro-structures. Therefore, the objective of this work is development of general physics-based methodology to correlate structural performance of RCS with inevitable variability of internal designs and demonstrate it on examples of representative composite sub-elements. Generated results can be used to provide guidance for simplifications and relaxation of existing quality requirements with obvious cost and availability improvement. Demonstration of implementation is shown on quantification of damage initiation in laminated structures under conditions of tension and bending.