Health indicators for diagnostics and prognostics of composite aerospace structures

Abstract

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 used to monitor the fatigue behavior of single stiffened composite panels (SSCPs) subjected to variable amplitude compression-compression (C-C) fatigue. Advanced features, called Health indicators (HIs) are extracted from the raw sensor data to monitor the degradation behavior. It is crucial to have robust and reliable HIs that capture the degradation of the structures. This work focuses on providing capable HIs for monitoring degradation of composite structures.