Scaled Acoustics Experiments and Vibration Prediction Based Structural Health Monitoring

Vibration and acoustic-based health monitoring techniques are presented to monitor structural health under dynamic environment. In order to extract damage sensitive features, linear and nonlinear dimensional reduction techniques are applied and compared. First, a vibration numerical study based on the damage index method is used to provide both location and severity of impact damage. Next, controlled scaled experimental measurements are taken to investigate the aeroacoustic properties of sub-scale wings under known damage conditions. The aeroacoustic nature of the flow field in and around generic aircraft wing damage is determined to characterize the physical mechanism of noise generated by the damage and its applicability to battle damage detection. Simulated battle damage is investigated using a baseline, and two damage models introduced; namely, (1) an undamaged wing as baseline, (2) chordwise-spanwise-partial-penetration (SCPP), and (3) spanwise-chordwise-full-penetration (SCFP). Dimensional reduction techniques are employed to extract time-frequency domain features, which can be used to detect the presence of structural damage. Results are given to illustrate effectiveness of this approach.Copyright © 2008 by ASME