Acoustic emission-based remaining useful life prognosis of aeronautical structures subjected to compressive fatigue loading

An increasing interest for Structural Health Monitoring has emerged in the last decades. Acoustic emission (AE) is one of the most popular and widely studied methodologies employed for monitoring, due to its capabilities of detecting, locating and capturing the evolution of damage. Most literature so far, has employed AE for characterizing...

A data driven methodology for upscaling remaining useful life predictions: From single- to multi-stiffened composite panels

In this paper we execute a complex test campaign to develop a novel methodology for the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation of complex multi-stiffened composite aeronautical panels utilizing Machine Learning models trained with Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) data from hierarchically simpler elements, i.e., single-stiffened panels....

An SHM Data-Driven Methodology for the Remaining Useful Life Prognosis of Aeronautical Subcomponents

Prognosis of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a structure from Structural Health Monitoring data is the ultimate level in the SHM hierarchy. Reliable prognostics are key to a Condition Based Maintenance paradigm for aerospace systems and structures. In the present work, we propose a methodology for RUL prognosis of generic aeronautical...

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...

Condition-Based Maintenance in Aviation: Challenges and Opportunities

Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) is a policy that uses information about the health condition of systems and structures to identify optimal maintenance interventions over time, increasing the efficiency of maintenance operations. Despite CBM being a well-established concept in academic research, the practical uptake in aviation needs to catch...

A novel strain-based health indicator for the remaining useful life estimation of degrading composite structures

We present a generic methodology for developing a Health Indicator out of strain-based Structural Health Monitoring data suitable for implementation in prognostic tasks. For this purpose, an in-house test campaign is launched. Single-stringered composite panels are subjected to compression-compression fatigue with the strains being monitored...

Damage Diagnostics on Post-buckled Stiffened Panels Utilizing the Digital-Twin Concept

A digital twin representative of a typical composite stiffened panel is utilized to monitor skin-to-stringer disbonds. A validated finite element model of the composite panel estimates the longitudinal strains of the pristine state, at the exact location where integrated fiber Bragg grating sensors are permanently installed. Experimental...

Assessing stiffness degradation of stiffened composite panels in post-buckling compression-compression fatigue using guided waves

The application of structural health monitoring (SHM) in composite airframe structural elements under long-term realistic fatigue loading needs to consider the structural behavior on the global level, which is an intricate task. The overall structural stiffness is a key design parameter for composite structures and the stiffness degradation...

Multi-level damage diagnosis on stiffened composite panels based on a damage-uninformative digital twin

In this study, a multi-level Structural Health Monitoring methodology for stiffened composite panels is introduced. A digital twin (DT), that is, a three-dimensional finite element (FE) model, representing the pristine state baseline of the test article, is developed and verified for compressive loading in the post-buckling regime. The...

Health monitoring of aerospace structures utilizing novel health indicators extracted from complex strain and acoustic emission data

The development of health indicators (HI) of diagnostic and prognostic potential from generally uninformative raw sensor data is both a challenge and an essential feature for data‐driven diagnostics and prognostics of composite structures. In this study, new damage‐sensitive features, developed from strains acquired with Fiber Bragg Grating ...

Health indicators for diagnostics and prognostics of composite aerospace structures

In order to reduce aircraft downtimes Condition-Based-Maintenance (CBM) is a topic gaining increased popularity in recent years. However, to apply such maintenance policies reliable health monitoring techniques should be implemented. Two state of the art monitoring techniques, namely Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBG) and Acoustic Emission (AE) are...

Structural health monitoring data fusion for in-situ life prognosis of composite structures

A novel framework to fuse structural health monitoring (SHM) data from different in-situ monitoring techniques is proposed aiming to develop a hyper-feature towards more effective prognostics. A state-of-the-art Non-Homogenous Hidden Semi Markov Model (NHHSMM) is utilized to model the damage accumulation of composite structures, subjected to...

Utilizing AE data and stochastic modelling towards fatigue damage diagnostics and prognostics of composites

The procedure of damage accumulation in composite materials, especially during fatigue loading, is a complex phenomenon which depends on a number of parameters such as ply orientation, material properties, geometrical non-linearities etc. Towards condition based health monitoring and decision making, the need not only for diagnostic but also for...