| Design to Prevent Fatigue |
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| Cosmos | |
| Mar 19 2007 | |
 Login first to download. In 1954, two crashes involving the world’s first commercial airliner, the de Havilland Comet, brought the words “metal fatigue” to newspaper headlines and into long-lasting public consciousness. The aircraft, also one of the first to have a pressurized cabin, had square windows. Pressurization combined with repeated flight loads caused cracks to form in the corners of the windows, and those cracks widened over time until the cabins fell apart. As well as being a human tragedy in which 68 people died, the Comet disasters were a wake-up call to engineers trying to create safe, strong designs. Since then, fatigue has been found at the root of failure of many mechanical components such as turbines and other rotating equipment operating under intense, repeated cyclical loads. The primary tool for both understanding and being able to predict and avoid fatigue has proven to be finite element analysis (FEA). |
