Open Access
Subscription or Fee Access
Inspection Requirements for Continued Airworthiness Using Structural Health Monitoring
Abstract
Aircraft structural components are subject to fatigue resulting in damage initiation, propagation, and subsequent catastrophic failure due to unstable damage growth. Current aviation regulation for inspection requirements to maintain continued airworthiness for fatigue critical components are based on non-destructive inspections (NDI) with a deterministic damage tolerance approach for fail-safe aircraft structures. Recently, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technology has shown great potential to improve aircraft safety, increase aircraft availability and reduce maintenance and inspection cost. However, SHM systems and traditional NDI systems exhibit different performance behavior from a probabilistic point of view. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a probabilistic approach to determine the inspection frequency for a SHM system to achieve the same reliability level in inspection requirements for continued airworthiness as for a traditional NDI system.
DOI
10.12783/shm2019/32113
10.12783/shm2019/32113