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The assessment of the service durability of aerospace components and assemblies has become an important segment of design. In order to meet strict safety requirements, a number of complex and long experiments are carried out. The use of finite element method (FEM) and extended finite element method (XFEM) for the estimation of fatigue life and fatigue crack growth predictions has been proved as a good alternative to the expensive experimental methods. In this paper, both experimental and numerical analyses of 2024-T3 aluminum spar of a light aircraft under variable amplitude loading are presented. FEM has been used for estimation of the spar life to crack initiation, whereas XFEM has been used for fatigue crack growth predictions and fatigue life estimation of damaged spar. The values of stress intensity factors were extracted from the XFEM solution in MorfeoCrack for Abaqus software.

In this paper the design, fabrication and analysis of behavior by full-scale verification testing for the tail rotor blade of composite laminated materials for a heavy transport helicopter is given. The verification test program for the tail rotor blade encompassed static and dynamic testing. The static tests of the blade involved experimental evaluation of torsional and flexional blade stiffness and its elastic axis position. Dynamic tests involved testing of vibratory characteristics and testing of blade fatigue characteristic. In structural vibration tests natural frequency, vibration modes and damping ratio for the structure were measured. The fatigue analysis of the structure of blade root section was performed after fatigue test cycles for detection of laminate separation, tolerance and distortion of crossections of structure.