ENGG409 Resit Coursework Report Definition | UOL

ENGG409 – Resit Report Definition

Summary

The report represents 60% of the total marks awarded for the module. The following document details the organisation, formatting and submission of the report. You will be assigned a different case-study and have a different design for the resit.

1.Assessment Tasks

Each report will consist of the following two parts:

1. The review of an assigned historical case studies where a breakdown in structural integrity may have been the root cause of a catastrophic failure.
2. The structural integrity analysis of a simplified aerospace component.
   Each of these tasks are described in more detail in Sections 4 and 5 of this document.

2.Submission

• The completed report is to be electronically submitted using Turnitin before 23:59 on Friday 23rd August.
• The filetype should be a .pdf file that is less than 40MB in size. The formatting on .doc and
  .docx files is sometimes corrupted during the upload process which is why I recommend PDF. It is your responsibility to check that the formatting is still correct after the work has been submitted.
• Plagiarism, whether copying from other students or off the internet, will be identified and investigated. Depending on severity, it could result in a grade of zero for the report and thus cause you to fail the module.

3.Report Structure

The report will comprise of the following format:

• Title page
• Summary,
• Contents page,
• Historical Case Study
• Structural Integrity Analysis
• References

Figures and tables must be referenced clearly from the text. A single reference section should appear at the end of the report.
The word limit for the entire report (i.e. both the historical case study and structural integrity analysis combined) is 3000 words. This does not include the title page, summary, contents page, or references. If you report is less than 2500 words then it is very likely that it lacks sufficient detail.

4.Historical Case Studies

Each person has been assigned a specific case study, this is specified in a separate document on Canvas. Use the, “Resit Report Individual Values” document to look up which case study is assigned to you. For each assigned case study, carry out a literature search and, in your own words, write a short review on the incident highlighting the circumstances of the incident and considering the specific structural failure or failures which caused it.

The focus of the case study should be on the cause of the incident, lessons learned from the incident and how implementing the three routes of structural integrity, outlined in the first lecture, could have avoided or mitigated the incident. A good source of information on each case study are the official reports that were publicly released in the aftermath of the incidents.

I suggest you split the historical case study part of the report into two sections. In the first section describe in your own words what happened, its cause and the key findings of the official report. In the second section use further literature to form your own discussion of how the failure could have been avoided. Identify which of the three routes of structural integrity are relevant and how they could have been used to avoid the failure.

It is important that you use your own words to describe what happened, directly quoting portions of the official report will result in very low grades for this part and could potentially lead to a plagiarism investigation.

Table 1: Historical case studies 

5.Structural Integrity Analysis

In the second part of your report you will be optimising a simplified aerospace component such that it is lightweight but still safe. The component is a plate, used to provide additional rigidity to the internal structure of the tailplane of a civil airliner. The component has been designed to be a planar sheet of metal with three holes and two rectangular cut-out region at its centre, see Figure 1. The component is manufactured from a rolled metal sheet using subtractive manufacturing techniques. When installed on the aircraft it carries a fluctuating load, uniformly applied at the far- left and far-right edges in the diagram. After the part has been installed it can only be inspected on one side.

Figure 1: Orthographic drawing of the component. A larger drawing is available on Canvas.

Whilst everybody will work with the same component, the applied loads and material will be different for each student. Each student will be assigned a minimum and maximum load for the component. These values can be found in the “Resit Report Individual Values” document. The frequency of the sinusoidal load is 0.15 Hz.

Figure 2: Sinusoidal load applied to the component. The values of 𝑃𝑚𝑎𝑥 and 𝑃𝑚𝑖𝑛 are different for each person and should be found in the Assessments Folder

This section should be broken up into sub-sections that describe different aspects of the analysis. Whilst I am interested in the decisions that you make in assessing and analysing the component, I am primarily marking how you have made those decisions and the assumptions that you have made in the process.

5.1.Introduction

A section focusing on possible failure modes for the component. When writing this section consider the following:

• At what locations are possible failure modes likely to occur?
• Are there minor modifications that could be made or manufacturing techniques that could be used to prevent or delay these failure modes?
• In particular, at what critical locations are fatigue cracks likely to grow?
• Choose the possible fatigue crack location that you feel is most likely to limit the life-span of the part.
  I am not looking for any quantitative analysis in this section. When identifying possible failure modes you should be able to identify 4 to 7 different locations at which failure may occur, don’t just limit yourself to considering fracture/fatigue. I recommend you create a few diagrams to show where the possible defects may occur and/or how they could lead to failure.

5.2.Inspection Procedure

A section focusing on how the component can be inspected after it is installed. Consider the following:

• Briefly identify non-destructive evaluation techniques that could be used to locate the possible defects discussed in Section 1.
• Of these techniques, choose the one technique that you would recommend for detecting the defects. Describe why you chose the technique; the decision should not be arbitrary.
• Describe how the inspection technique should be applied to the part, do not describe the inspection technique in general. I am looking for a description of how the technique would be applied to this specific part.
• Conduct research to identify the smallest defect size that can be detected with your chosen inspection procedure.

5.3.Numerical Analysis

In this section you will use the R6 methodology and fatigue analysis to analyse the fatigue crack that you identified as most significant in the introduction section. You will use this analysis to specify the thickness of the component.

• Use the slow crack growth approach of damage tolerant design as part of your analysis.
• Specify the thickness such that it can safely be used for 400 hours between inspections.
• When choosing equations and parameters you should support the reasons for your choice.
• End this section with a brief discussion of the limitations of your analysis and how it could be improved.