An energy-efficient cyber-physical system for wireless on-board aircraft structural health monitoring

Abstract

In this paper, an energy-efficient cyber physical system using piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) is proposed, designed and experimentally validated for on-board aircraft structural health monitoring (SHM). A WSN is exploited to coordinate damage detection using PZTs distributed on the whole aircraft. An active sensing methodology is adopted for PZTs to evaluate the structural integrity in a pitch-catch manner. The system configuration and operation principle are discussed in the first place. Then, the detailed hardware design was introduced. The proposed system is not only characterized as low-power, high-compactness and wireless, but also capable of processing actuating-sensing signals at megahertz, generating actuating signals with great flexibility, handling multiple actuating-sensing channels with marginal crosstalk. The design was implemented on a 4-layer printed circuit board (8 × 6.5 cm) and evaluated on a large-scale composite fuselage. A 5 MHz sampling rate for actuating and 1.8 MHz for sensing (8 channels) were realized, and the accuracy was validated by comparing the results with those from an oscilloscope. The crosstalk issue caused by actuation on sensing channels is properly addressed using a 2-stage attenuation method. An ultra-low current (81.7 µA) was measured when no detection was required; the average current was 0.45 mA with a detection rate of twice per hour, which means the system can continuously work for up to 12.6 months for 2 AA batteries. Eventually, an example of damage detection is provided, showing the capability of such a system in SHM.

Development of an automated assessment technology for detecting damage in body armour

“…The AU principle of damage detection has been applied to a variety of structures and materials in a range of work using lab-based equipment 12,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] . Researchers such as Fu et al 27 The concept of the developed device is presented in Figure 2. With the aim of applying a system to body armour a few considerations had to be made:…”

A Practical Structural Health Monitoring System for High-Speed Train Car-Body

“…In this study, the baseline sensor data is compesated by shifting and scaling of the sensor signal intelligently. The temperature compensation is considered to reconstruct the baseline signal by obtaining the correlation between temperature T and corresponding correlation coefficient of baseline signal coef o acquired under no damage condition, which can be defined as (8).…”

“…Previously, different SHM system has been widely used in many areas, such as aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering [5]- [8], and a number of SHM technologies have been proposed [9], [10]. For example, Fu et al [8] proposed an on-board aircraft SHM system based on the piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) and wireless sensor networks (WSN).…”

A Convolutional Neural Network for Impact Detection and Characterization of Complex Composite Structures

“…Although there have been recent advances in the technological developments for both active and passive sensing technologies [45,46], in terms of methodologies however, most of the reported work with CNN have been on simple structure with isotropic properties and the scalability of the method on real structures under operational load have not been demonstrated. The main aim of this work is to investigate the applicability of CNN in impact detection and identification of complex composite structures such as aircraft stiffened panel.…”