An Investigation on Damage Detection in Aircrafts Panels Using Nonlinear Time Series Analysis

This study investigates a possibility for representing, interpreting and visualising the vibration response of aircraft panels using time domain measurements. The aircraft panels are modelled as thin orthotropic plates and their vibration response is simulated using FE modelling. The vibration response of a thin aluminium panel is simulated using FE modelling. The first ten resonant frequencies are estimated for the FE model and for the dynamically tested panel. They were found to show somewhat low sensitivity to damage. Then the simulated vibration response of the panel is transformed and expanded in a new phase space. This presents an alternative way to study and analyse the dynamics of a structure. A two dimensional phase space is used in this investigation. Thus instead of studying the single dimension measured vibration characteristics one is faced with expanded two dimensional variables which can be visualised and this facilitates the comparison between the damaged and the non-damage states.