Active health monitoring of an aircraft wing with embedded piezoelectric sensor/actuator network: I. Defect detection, localization and growth monitoring

This work focuses on an ultrasonic guided wave structural health monitoring (SHM) system development for aircraft wing inspection. In part I of the study, a detailed description of a real aluminum wing specimen and some preliminary wave propagation tests on the wing panel are presented. Unfortunatel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Smart materials and structures 2007-08, Vol.16 (4), p.1208-1217
Main Authors: Zhao, Xiaoliang, Gao, Huidong, Zhang, Guangfan, Ayhan, Bulent, Yan, Fei, Kwan, Chiman, Rose, Joseph L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustical measurements and instrumentation
Acoustics
Exact sciences and technology
Fracture mechanics (crack, fatigue, damage...)
Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications)
General equipment and techniques
Instruments, apparatus, components and techniques common to several branches of physics and astronomy
Measurement and testing methods
Physics
Servo and control equipment
robots
Solid mechanics
Structural and continuum mechanics
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Summary:This work focuses on an ultrasonic guided wave structural health monitoring (SHM) system development for aircraft wing inspection. In part I of the study, a detailed description of a real aluminum wing specimen and some preliminary wave propagation tests on the wing panel are presented. Unfortunately, strong attenuation and scattering impede guided waves for large-area inspection. Nevertheless, small, low-cost and light-weight piezoelectric (PZT) discs were bonded to various parts of the aircraft wing, in a form of relatively sparse arrays, for simulated cracks and corrosion monitoring. The PZT discs take turns generating and receiving ultrasonic guided waves. Pair-wise through-transmission waveforms collected at normal conditions served as baselines, and subsequent signals collected at defected conditions such as rivet cracks or corrosion detected the presence of a defect and its location with a novel correlation analysis based technique called RAPID (reconstruction algorithm for probabilistic inspection of defects). The effectiveness of the algorithm was tested with several case studies in a laboratory environment. It showed good performance for defect detection, size estimation and localization in complex aircraft wing structures.
ISSN:0964-1726
1361-665X
DOI:10.1088/0964-1726/16/4/032