TABLE OF CONTENTS The safety of composite structures is a challenging subject for many reasons. Not only is it so because innovation by definition precludes substantial use of service data in design methods and in the safety field, but also because service experience accumulates slowly due to the fact that a variety of new materials, new processes and new structural concepts enter the arena continuously.
The successful introduction of composite structures in all applications, where it makes sense, is a very worthy target, but only when the innovations possess better than or equivalent levels of safety compared to the structures they replace.
The "aluminum design world" has produced safe structures for an array of flight vehicles in an environment with an ever-increasing complexity and rising performance demands. We need a new road to success that promises better, safer and cheaper products. The answer that seems to be the most attractive, at this time is, composite structure, if done right. Many successful applications have been introduced, but there still is much more to achieve for commercial airliners, and safety is an important ingredient.
Damage tolerance is the dominating safety concern in the design of composite structure, and Chapter 2 provided a number of illustrations of the difficulty in providing survivability after the structural integrity is lost, especially for long inspection periods.
It seems that an alternative strategy would be to make "undetected loss of integrity" a very rare event. So the event of interest is a loss of integrity that eludes...
