Research of the incipient fault detection method for an airfoil based on near flutter analysis

On the problem of preventing and reducing flight accidents, the incipient fault detection for an airfoil has important significance of enhancing the safety and reliability of aircrafts. Because offline detection approaches cannot detect small incipient faults in time, a new online frequency domain analysis method based on near flutter analysis of an airfoil is proposed. With this approach, fault detection can be accomplished by limited samples online. Small faults of an airfoil which is hard to detect in normal conditions is amplified by the near flutter condition through this method. Then amplified signals are processed through the frequency domain analysis method. So we built a simulation model for two-dimensional pitch and plunge apparatus to verify the fault detection method. Finally, the simulation results show that the approach based on near flutter analysis not only can detect incipient faults, but also can detect different fault conditions of an airfoil.