PROGRESSIVE FAILURE ANALYSIS AND RESIDUAL LIFE PREDICTION FOR FUEL

The progressive failure analysis and residual lifeprediction of composite fuel tank are an important part of safety evaluations ofRLV. In this paper, based on classical laminates theory, analytic and tokenmodels of composite fuel tank are built. By the finite element softwareABAQUS, the progressive failure analysis is carried out and the residual lifeof a fuel tank is predicted. Compared with literature data, good agreementsare obtained, which validates the methods proposed in the paper.