In this article you will find an interesting overview about the future of SHM for aircrafts:
Future Inspection Technologies (from avitaion week)
Here are a few interesting quotes:
Posit for a moment the airplane of the future, a flying machine all but freed from scheduled inspections, able to keep flying because of sets of sophisticated sensors imbedded within it.
Behold, the monitored machine.
In perhaps a decade or so, a mechanic might do a walk around inspection, much as the first officer does at pre-flight, just before departure. But this walkaround would be far more probing. Armed with a wireless ultrasound device, "your technician walks past the airplane and a little chip beeps at him," envisions Michael Moles, senior technology manager for Olympus NDT. "He knows then and there whether there's a problem." This, contends the veteran NDT executive, "will tend to be the future," a future predicated not so much on periodic inspection, as on structural health monitoring.
The irreducible criteria regulators will consider whether the in-situ sensor "works as [well] or better than my current hand-held inspection technique," said Roach. That's step one, a step that conceivably could lead to what Roach and Rackow write terms, "Condition-based maintenance practices ... substituted for the current time-based maintenance approach." At the very least, the Sandia researchers contend in-situ sensors render it "possible to produce an aircraft prognostic health architecture that can assist in maintenance scheduling and tracking."
Future Inspection Technologies (from avitaion week)
Here are a few interesting quotes:
Posit for a moment the airplane of the future, a flying machine all but freed from scheduled inspections, able to keep flying because of sets of sophisticated sensors imbedded within it.
Behold, the monitored machine.
In perhaps a decade or so, a mechanic might do a walk around inspection, much as the first officer does at pre-flight, just before departure. But this walkaround would be far more probing. Armed with a wireless ultrasound device, "your technician walks past the airplane and a little chip beeps at him," envisions Michael Moles, senior technology manager for Olympus NDT. "He knows then and there whether there's a problem." This, contends the veteran NDT executive, "will tend to be the future," a future predicated not so much on periodic inspection, as on structural health monitoring.
The irreducible criteria regulators will consider whether the in-situ sensor "works as [well] or better than my current hand-held inspection technique," said Roach. That's step one, a step that conceivably could lead to what Roach and Rackow write terms, "Condition-based maintenance practices ... substituted for the current time-based maintenance approach." At the very least, the Sandia researchers contend in-situ sensors render it "possible to produce an aircraft prognostic health architecture that can assist in maintenance scheduling and tracking."
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