Hierarchical Upscaling of Data-Driven Damage Diagnostics for Stiffened Composite Aircraft Structures

To move towards a condition-based maintenance practice for aircraft structures, design of reliable health management methodologies is required. Development of diagnostic methodologies is commonly realised on simplified sample structures with assumptions that methodologies can be adapted for application to realistic aircraft structures under...

Intelligent Health Indicators Based on Semi-supervised Learning Utilizing Acoustic Emission Data

Health indicators are indices that act as intermediary links between raw SHM data and prognostic models. An efficient HI should satisfy prognostic requirements such as monotonicity, trendability, and prognosability in such a way that it can be effectively used as an input in a prognostic model for remaining useful life estimation. However,...

Intelligent health indicator construction for prognostics of composite structures utilizing a semi-supervised deep neural network and SHM data

A health indicator (HI) is a valuable index demonstrating the health level of an engineering system or structure, which is a direct intermediate connection between raw signals collected by structural health monitoring (SHM) methods and prognostic models for remaining useful life estimation. An appropriate HI should conform to prognostic...

On the Challenges of Upscaling Damage Monitoring Methodologies for Stiffened Composite Aircraft Panels

Health management methodologies for condition-based maintenance are often developed using sensor data collected during experimental tests. Most tests performed in laboratories focus on a coupon level or flat panels, while structural component testing is less commonly seen. As researchers, we often consider our experimental tests to be...

The Need for Multi-Sensor Data Fusion in Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Aircraft Structures

With the increased use of composites in aircraft, many new successful contributions to the advancement of the structural health monitoring (SHM) field for composite aerospace structures have been achieved. Yet its application is still not often seen in operational conditions in the aircraft industry, mostly due to a gap between research focus...

Fusion-based damage diagnostics for stiffened composite panels

Conducting damage diagnostics on stiffened panels is commonly performed using a single SHM technique. However, each SHM technique has both its strengths and limitations. Rather than straining the expansion of single SHM techniques going beyond their intrinsic capacities, these strengths and limitations should instead be considered in their...

Damage Diagnostics of a Composite Single-Stiffener Panel Under Fatigue Loading Utilizing SHM Data Fusion

A case study is presented in which the first steps are made towards the development of a structural health monitoring (SHM) data fusion framework. For this purpose, a composite single-stiffener panel is subjected to compression-compression fatigue loading (R = 10). The carbon-epoxy panel contains an artificial disbond of 30 mm, which was...

Damage Diagnostics Utilizing Sensor Data Fusion

Experimental campaign to develop a multi-sensing structural health monitoring (SHM) framework in order to diagnose impact damage in stiffened composite aircraft structures on all four SHM levels, namely 1) detection, 2) localisation, 3) type, and 4) severity.