A Novel Approach to Dynamic Contact Analysis in the Course of Aircraft Assembly Simulation

A new numerical approach is proposed for studying possible vibrations caused by drilling during the assembly of aircraft structures. It is based on modelling of the stress-strain state of assembled structures by solving the corresponding transient contact problem. This approach is intended for fast dynamic analysis of the structure in the drilling area. It includes a time discretization algorithm, a special reduction technique and a reformulation of contact problem in terms of quadratic programming. The high speed of the algorithm allows one to combine the non-stationary calculations with variation analysis in order to check the possible deviations in the shape of assembled parts. The proposed approach is validated by commercial software and it is also applied for analysis of a test problem.