Course Description

Mechanical fasteners are among the most critical load-carrying elements in aerospace structures. The strength, reliability, and damage tolerance of aircraft wings, fuselage, empennage, landing gear attachments, and numerous structural assemblies depend on correctly designed riveted and bolted joints.

This course provides a classical hand calculation approach to the analysis and design of mechanically fastened connections used in aerospace structures. Rather than relying solely on software, you will develop the engineering fundamentals required to understand how loads are transferred through fasteners and how different failure modes govern joint strength.

You will learn how to evaluate the load-carrying capacity of rivets and bolts, calculate allowable stresses, identify governing failure modes, analyze eccentrically loaded fastener groups, and understand the behavior of connections installed in multiple planes. These engineering principles are essential for validating FEA results and developing safe, lightweight, and structurally efficient aerospace designs.

The course emphasizes engineering physics, classical strength-of-materials principles, and aerospace structural design methodology, enabling engineers to perform calculations with confidence before numerical verification.

Whether you are designing a new aerospace structure or validating an existing design, this course will help you develop a deeper understanding of mechanically fastened connections used throughout the aerospace industry.

What You Will Learn

• Ultimate Allowable Shearing Strength of Mechanical Fasteners
• Ultimate Allowable Bearing Strength of Plates and Fasteners
• Shear-Out Failure Analysis
• Ultimate Allowable Tensile Strength
• Eccentrically Loaded Fastener Group Analysis
• Analysis of Connections Having Mechanical Fasteners Installed in Two Different Planes
• Load Transfer Mechanisms in Riveted and Bolted Joints
• Identification of Critical Failure Modes
• Classical Hand Calculations for Aerospace Structures
• Engineering Fundamentals for FEA Validation

Who Should Enroll?

• Aerospace Structural Engineers
• Aerospace Stress Engineers
• Mechanical Design Engineers
• FEA Engineers
• Aircraft Design Engineers
• Product Design Engineers
• CAE Engineers
• Graduate and Final-Year Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering Students
• Engineers preparing for careers in the aerospace industry

Prerequisites

A basic understanding of:

• Strength of Materials
• Engineering Mechanics
• Mechanical Design Fundamentals

No prior FEA software knowledge is required.

Why This Course?

• Learn industry-relevant classical hand calculations used in aerospace structural design.
• Understand why mechanically fastened joints fail and how to prevent failure through engineering analysis.
• Strengthen your ability to validate finite element models using engineering fundamentals.
• Build a solid foundation for aircraft structural and stress analysis.
• Gain practical knowledge that can be applied to aerospace, UAV, defense, and high-performance mechanical structures.

Course Outcome

After completing this course, you will be able to independently analyze and design mechanically fastened aerospace connections, evaluate multiple failure modes, perform engineering hand calculations, and apply these principles to support reliable structural design and FEA verification.

Build your aerospace structural engineering expertise from first principles—through classical hand calculations that form the foundation of safe, efficient, and reliable aircraft structures.