Effect of various drilling procedures on the fatigue life of rivet holes

Abstract EN

The use of riveting as an assembly technique, especially in the aeronautical construction, requires the implementation of several holes in aluminium alloy sheets.

This leads to an inhomogeneous stress and strain fields' distribution and to stress localization in the drilled zones which will be affecting the fatigue life of 2024-T3 aluminium alloy.

In addition, the machining process used for drilling can increase or decrease the fatigue life of materials.

This paper presents results of an experimental study which main objective is to determine the drilling procedure that least affects the fatigue life and to show the role of the residual stresses introduced by each process on the fatigue behaviour of material.

For that, four drilling procedures are compared in fatigue: Direct drilling bit of the desired diameter, drilling a small diameter hole called a pilot hole in the rivet hole location prior to drilling the final diameter using a reamer, water jet and finally punching.

Hole’s quality is compared using two parameters: Conicity and surface quality observed using a scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

X-ray diffraction is used to determine the residual stress profile resulting from each drilling procedure.