Experimental and Numerical Study of NACA and Conventional Riveting Procedure

Fatigue behaviour is one of the most important properties of modern airplanes and rivets influence it strongly. According to the literature, the NACA riveting offers a multiple increase in the fatigue life of joints. The aim of this paper is to investigate the benefits offered by the NACA riveting procedure with respect to the residual stress and strain distribution after riveting as well as rivet hole expansion. Experimental and numerical approaches were adopted. The conventional riveting with both the universal and countersunk rivets was compared with the NACA riveting. The countersunk angle and depth in the case of the NACA riveting was modified somewhat relative to the values met in the literature. For these three cases, strain gauge measurements during riveting, hole expansion measurements and FE calculations were performed. The hole expansion measurement with the use of Computer Tomography(CT) was proposed. Only the FE calculations unambiguously indicate better fatigue properties of the NACA riveting. The proposed method of hole expansion measurement requires further research to increase its accuracy.