Aircraft Structural Health Monitoring Using Transmissibility Identification

A transmissibility is an output-only relationship that relates one subset of outputs of a system to another subset of outputs of the same system. In this paper, we use transmissibility operators for fault detection and health monitoring of aircraft structures. We use ANSYS, a finite-element-analysis based software, to simulate the aircraft wing, where two forces are acting on the wing simultaneously. Five sensors are attached to the wing to measure the wing deflection at their locations. Noncausal FIR models are used with least squares to identify transmissibilities between the five sensors measurements. We consider the case where a crack occurs in the wing structure during operation. We show that transmissibilities can be used to detect the change in the wing structure dynamics without the need for a model of the underlying system or the excitation signal. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.