Structural health monitoring platform for industrial scale composite structures

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring technologies have been proposed in multiple research publications as a path forward to shift the current scheduled-based maintenance operations to a more physics-informed condition-based maintenance. The implementation of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technologies on aircraft components requires the development of a single platform able to perform the required signal acquisition and data storage for posterior post-processing. This manuscript outlines the further developments on a SHM data acquisition platform which enables monitoring environmental temperature variations with parallel performance of both active Guided Wave Structural Health Monitoring and Electromechanical Impedance analysis with sequential upload of the test’s meta-data to an SQL database for posterior data processing and information safekeeping. The current platform was validated during the complete sensorization and damage detection on a large curved composite stiffened panel, representative an aircraft fuselage barrel section.