Session: 15-01: Structural Health Monitoring

Paper Number: 97228

97228 - Shm Ndt Application on Airbus Aircraft – Qualification Process and 1st Application Cases 

Airbus is engaged in the development of Structural Health Monitoring solutions to reduce maintenance costs. SHM solutions for damage detection are particularly under investigation as alternative to “classical” NDT tasks. These damage detection systems are intended to be installed on the aircraft and interrogated at dedicated checks in the life of the aircraft. Such type of configurations can be seen as an “NDT-like” SHM approaches, where the NDT sensor is permanently installed. In this case a damage detection performance demonstration must be performed to ensure the detection performances of the SHM solution along the life of the aircraft, thus including the effects of environment and durability. In this presentation the performance demonstration approach developed at Airbus will be presented, as well as results obtained on a first concrete configuration.

The first part of the presentation will show the qualification process developed for this purpose, including how the effects of the environment and the durability are considered.

In the second part of the presentation, one demonstrator scenario application will be presented. It will be explained how SHM sensors are expected to replace classical NDT tasks and to avoid heavy maintenance operations for accessing the area to be inspected with classical NDT methods.

Presenting Author: Benjamin Eckstein AIRBUS OPERATIONS SAS