Investigations of the Mechanical Behavior of Naturally Weathered Envelopes Based on a Long-Term Service Airship
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34, Issue 1
Abstract
Manufactured with a multilayer functional composite fabric envelope, lighter-than-air (LTA) airships offer a cost-effective approach for payload platforms. Considering the long-term service of LTA airships and their severe operating environments, the weathering degradation of the envelope materials is of extreme importance. However, few researchers have focused on the mechanical degradation of envelope materials from authentic LTA airships. In this study, URETEK3216LV, a typical weathered airship envelope, was sampled from a decommissioned authentic airship structure. A series of tests, including monouniaxial tensile tests, uniaxial cyclic tensile tests, and biaxial cyclic tensile tests, were performed to determine different specimen specifications. It was found that the strength reduction in warp reached more than 40%, and the breaking strain decreased. The elastic constants were calculated using the stress-strain curve fitting and the minimal residual strain method. According to the results, the degradation of the biaxial tensile elastic moduli was more severe than that of the uniaxial parameters, as the Poisson’s ratio remained almost unchanged. In future research, the results can be applied to the long-term analyses of airship structures, such as durable evaluation and deformation calculation.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51778362 and 51608320) and the Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant No. 2016YFB1200200). Linrui Jia provided valuable assistance in the methods selection, and Shizan He participated in conducting the experiments and performing the preliminary data analysis. The authors acknowledge the aforementioned parties for their help and thank them, as well as others, who will remain unmentioned.
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34 • Issue 1 • January 2021
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 17, 2018
Accepted: Jul 21, 2020
Published online: Oct 28, 2020
Published in print: Jan 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Mar 28, 2021
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