Joint nonlinearity in a stiffened aluminium wingbox panel and what it requires of a reduced basis

Abstract

A shell finite-element model of a stiffened aluminium wingbox panel, a laboratory structure shared by several experimental studies, is built with its plate-to-stiffener joints at the $78$ physical fastener positions and calibrated against measured modal data, a six-parameter sensitivity update of the substructure moduli within $\pm20\%$ reproducing the first five measured modes to $1.1$--$4.3\%$ with modal-assurance values of $0.88$--$1.00$. Making the fasteners nonlinear, at equal mesh, mass and damping, shows that joint nonlinearity enters the response strongly asymmetrically. Hardening is almost invisible, at most $+1\%$ in frequency, whereas softening or slipping the joints moves the first three resonances by $-2.1$, $-4.9$ and $-9.2\%$, and friction removes up to $80\%$ of the resonant peak before it recovers. Newmark integration of all $18{,}804$ degrees of freedom and a harmonic balance condensed exactly onto the joints and continued in arclength agree to $5.5\times10^{-4}$. A projection-based nonlinear model order reduction then locates the criterion that a jointed structure imposes on a reduced basis. The binding quantity is not the linear response, which eleven vectors reproduce to better than $0.01\%$, but the receptance of the structure between the joints, of which $126$ global eigenvectors carry about $2\%$, and without which the reduced model overpredicts the hardening shift of the fundamental by a factor of thirty and returns a value beyond the rigid-joint limit of the panel.