Main objectives > Structures
Integrated Systems for the detection of flaws can not only increase safety but also facilitate inspection of parts of the structure that are not accessible during normal aircraft operation or simple checks. These sensors can help to avoid dismantling parts of the aircraft to do the conventional inspection, to realise a considerable drop of maintenance costs. New structure concepts such as the CFRP fuselage need these sensor technologies because complicated multi-layer sandwich construction (that might be decisive part of the part of the design concept) cannot be inspected thoroughly without integrated systems. It is likely that these CRFP components will be crucial in the design philosophy. There are however a number of technologies available which may be applicable to these applications (acoustic, electric, optical, etc.). Within this work package these technologies will be assessed to determine that all factors affecting the structural integrity can be efficiently detected and monitored. Of particular interest will be the performance, reliability, and airworthiness of these technologies.
The key milestones of this work package are the technology selection, the selection of partners/sub-contractors to provide the technologies, implementation and evaluation. The principle of damage tolerance design can only be applied completely if the components are observed during lifetime. Health Monitoring introduces a new safety aspect into the design and allows longer maintenance periods. This will reduce maintenance costs noticeably. Of course, the reliability of the sensor itself must be ensured by intelligent sensor design and trusty integration into the structure. At the moment structural damages that have been detected are repaired at once. This can mean unscheduled maintenance stops and high costs. Health Monitoring systems can be used to shift the repair actions to dates where they can be included into scheduled, bigger maintenance actions in a more clever way. By this method repairs can be postponed because one introduces an additional safety aspect to the structure and therefore reduce the number of unscheduled maintenance inspections and repairs.
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