Preliminary Fatigue Life Prediction of Composite Wing under Gust Spectrum Loads Using a CUF-Based Approach

Abstract. This work presents a framework for predicting the fatigue life of a composite aircraft wing under von Kármán gust spectrum loads. The approach integrates the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) for high-fidelity structural modeling with Dirlik’s frequency-domain method for fatigue estimation. The influence of turbulence intensity and scale on fatigue life is examined, demonstrating that the proposed CUF-based method offers an accurate and computationally efficient tool for early-stage design of composite aerospace structures.