Can real-time flange tightness monitoring be possible with strains? A numerical pre-study.

The tightness of a flange depends on the current deformation state of the structure. For obvious reasons, this could be a critical and important information. In this paper, numerical preliminary investigations are presented on the question whether the deformation state inside a contact surface can be estimated in a very short time with a few strain measurements outside the contact surface.The presented theory is numerically evaluated using a flange with 12 bores. It turns out, that the deformation inside the contact area, and therefore the tightness, can be computed out of strain data in milliseconds. The magnitude of the strains are in a measurable range and the numerical results show robustness against noise. Even if the presented approach may not be applicable one-to-one for measurements, this numerical preliminary investigation shows that mechanical strains could in principal be used to observe the state or the tightness within a joint.