Skipping unnecessary structural airframe maintenance using an on-board structural health monitoring system

Structural airframe maintenance is a subset of scheduled maintenance, and is performed at regular intervals to detect and repair cracks that would otherwise affect the safety of the airplane. It has been observed that only a fraction of airplanes undergo structural airframe maintenance at earlier scheduled maintenance times. But, intrusive inspection of all panels on the airplanes needs to be performed at the time of scheduled maintenance to ascertain the presence/absence of large cracks critical to the safety of the airplane. Recently, structural health monitoring techniques have been developed. They use on-board sensors and actuators to assess the current damage status of the airplane, and can be used as a tool to skip the structural airframe maintenance whenever deemed unnecessary. Two maintenance philosophies, scheduled structural health monitoring and condition-based maintenance skip, have been developed in this article to skip unnecessary structural airframe maintenances using the on-board structural health monitoring system. A cost model is developed to quantify the savings of these maintenance philosophies over scheduled maintenance.

[1]  Pravat Kumar Ray,et al.  Prediction of fatigue crack growth and residual life using an exponential model: Part II (mode-I overload induced retardation) , 2009 .

[2]  Huajiang Ouyang,et al.  Modeling of fatigue crack propagation using dual boundary element method and Gaussian Monte Carlo method , 2010 .

[3]  Kossi P. Adzakpa,et al.  Minimizing maintenance cost involving flow-time and tardiness penalty with unequal release dates , 2007, ArXiv.

[4]  Stéphane Segonds,et al.  Multidisciplinary Optimization under Uncertainty for Preliminary Aircraft Sizing , 2011 .

[5]  John E. T. Penny,et al.  Crack Modeling for Structural Health Monitoring , 2002 .

[6]  S. Eggwertz,et al.  Probabilistic damage tolerance analysis of aircraft structures , 1987 .

[7]  Victor Giurgiutiu,et al.  Piezoelectric Wafer Embedded Active Sensors for Aging Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring , 2002 .

[8]  J. Newman,et al.  Fatigue-life prediction methodology using small-crack theory , 1999 .

[9]  Bruce R. Ellingwood,et al.  MAINTAINING RELIABILITY OF CONCRETE STRUCTURES. I: ROLE OF INSPECTION/REPAIR , 1994 .

[10]  Keith Worden,et al.  An introduction to structural health monitoring , 2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[11]  Guang Meng,et al.  A modularized framework for predictive maintenance scheduling , 2012 .

[12]  James H. Starnes,et al.  Analytical Methodology for Predicting the Onset of Widespread Fatigue Damage in Fuselage Structure , 1996 .

[13]  Seok-Heum Baek,et al.  Reliability design of preventive maintenance scheduling for cumulative fatigue damage , 2009 .

[14]  H. A. Thompson,et al.  Multi-objective genetic algorithm for optimization of system safety and reliability based on IEC 61508 requirements: A practical approach , 2007 .

[15]  Raphael T. Haftka,et al.  Effects of Uncertainty Reduction Measures by Structural Health Monitoring on Safety and Lifecycle Costs of Aircrafts , 2010 .

[16]  B. Brandecker,et al.  Ageing airplane repair assessment program for Airbus A300 , 1992 .

[17]  P. Packman,et al.  DEFINITION OF FATIGUE CRACKS THROUGH NONDESTRUCTIVE TESTING , 1969 .

[18]  Antoine Grall,et al.  Joint modelling and optimization of monitoring and maintenance performance for a two-unit parallel system , 2007 .

[19]  Karl H. Frank,et al.  Optimal inspection scheduling of steel bridges using nondestructive testing techniques , 2006 .

[20]  A. S. Naser,et al.  Structural Health Monitoring Using Transmittance Functions , 1999 .

[21]  Lorrie Molent,et al.  A comparison of crack growth behaviour in several full-scale airframe fatigue tests , 2007 .

[22]  Tony Yi Torng,et al.  Cost/Benefit Analysis for Intergration of Non-Deterministic Analysis and In-Situ Monitoring for Structural Integrity , 2011 .

[23]  S. M. Beden,et al.  Review of fatigue crack propagation models for metallic components , 2009 .

[24]  Alan P. Berens,et al.  Evaluation of NDE Reliability Characterization. Volume I , 1981 .

[25]  P. C. Paris,et al.  A Critical Analysis of Crack Propagation Laws , 1963 .