Structural Health Monitoring –The Key Enabler of Condition Based Maintenance in Aviation

Abstract

The Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe (ACARE) envisages that, by 2050, all new aircraft will be designed for condition-based maintenance (CBM). This will result in a significant 40% reduction in Maintenance Repair & Overhaul (MRO) process time and costs, increase in aircraft availability, and maximization of asset utilization. The backbone of CBM is the continuous monitoring of the aircraft performance utilizing permanently installed sensors. Naturally, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) plays an essential role on the successful implementation of CBM as it provides the needed information for structural assessment of critical aircraft structures. This paper discusses how SHM fits into the framework of CBM and highlights the results of the European project ReMAP – Real-time CBM for adaptive Aircraft Maintenance Planning. More specifically, the consortium efforts for multi-sensing SHM system integration, data synchronization and information fusion will be presented, while emphasis will be given into the conceptual design of a SHM system that is capable of damage anomaly detection, global location identification, damage type assessment, damage severity and prognostics. Innovative data-driven machine-learning algorithms were developed during the project which enabled health diagnostics and prognostics tasks of primary structures using data collected during tests at lower structural levels. This talk will demonstrate that hierarchical testing of SHM systems and scale-up approaches are a key for putting SHM into practice and for making steps towards CBM.