The role of fretting corrosion and fretting fatigue in aircraft rivet hole cracking

Personnel in the Quality and Integrity Design Engineering Center (QIDEC) at the University of Utah are working under a two year grant from the FAA to better understand the role of fretting corrosion and fretting fatigue in aircraft rivet hole cracking. The current program follows a one year grant program which was completed in 1993. This paper provides a status report on the results of these grant programs. Recent effort has been focused on developing basic fretting fatigue models which consider variation in the coefficient of friction with time and location within the fretting interface. This is a very important characteristic of the QIDEC model because coefficient of friction varies significantly during the fretting fatigue process. Copies of QIDEC documents discussed in this paper can be obtained by contacting the authors.