Design of Multi-level Structural Health Monitoring for Data Fusion in Real Scale Aerostructures

This paper present the application and challenges of a multi-sensory structural health monitoring-methodology on an industrial 5m long curved composite wing panel, for detecting barely visible impact damage based on integrated sensors data. Firstly, it presents a systematic design for a comprehensive structural health monitoring system for impact detection and related-damage characterization in complex aerostructures. The conceived approach relies on different technologies to offer multi-level diagnosis, including impact detection as well as damage identification, localization and sizing. The use of different excitation and sensing techniques (based on piezoelectric transducers, distributed fiber optic sensors and fiber Bragg gratings) deployed all over wing structures is explored towards continuous health management. The first design review carried out demonstrates the needs for multi-sensory information as well as the necessity of proper system to the fuse the information gathered from different sensors. Instead, the first experiments carried out independently at laboratory level showed promising results in detecting low velocity impacts as well as characterizing barely visible damage occurring at structural level.