Irene Li

A novel real-time health monitoring system for unmanned vehicles

Real-time monitoring the status of in-service structures such as unmanned vehicles can provide invaluable information to detect the damages to the structures on time. The unmanned vehicles can be maintained and repaired in time if such damages are found. One typical cause of damages of unmanned vehicles is from impacts caused by bumping into some obstacles or being hit by some objects such as hostile fire. This paper introduces a novel impact event sensing system that can detect the location of the impact events and the force-time history of the impact events. The system consists of the Piezo-electric sensor network, the hardware platform and the analysis software. The new customized battery-powered impact event sensing system supports up to 64-channel parallel data acquisition. It features an innovative low-power hardware trigger circuit that monitors 64 channels simultaneously. The system is in the sleep mode most of the time. When an impact event happens, the system will wake up in micro-seconds and detect the impact location and corresponding force-time history. The system can be combined with the SMART sensing system to further evaluate the impact damage severity.

Challenges in Meeting the Framework for SHM System Certification and Compliance

Monitoring the continued health of aircraft subsystems and identifying problems before they affect airworthiness has been a long-term goal of the aviation industry. Towards this end, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems that could be used for the in-service monitoring of the health of new and existing aircraft structures are being matured. This paper will go step-by-step into the various challenges associated with meeting preliminary certification compliance requirements. A 5-year program completed under funding from the Federal Aviation Administration will be used as a guide to lead the reader through the various certification compliance steps The objectives of this program were to (1) develop, validate, and demonstrate Smart Patch System (SPS) technologies including advanced software, algorithms, and methodologies for structures and dynamic components to (a) detect fatigue cracks and damages before exceeding critical threshold or incipient failure and (b) characterize fatigue cracks and damages, and (2) develop preliminary certification compliance requirements and a framework for certification of an SPS that would be integrated into a Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) for the fatigue crack monitoring of commercial rotorcraft structures per the guidelines provided in FAA Advisory Circular AC 29-2C, Section MG-15. This paper will use this program as a guide to discuss certification compliance challenges and recent work done to meet them. It presents the details on the tasks that were conducted towards the development, validation, and potential certification of the SPS and other similar SHM systems for specific structural applications.

State-of-the-art pipeline Structural Health Monitoring systems

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a new and upcoming method of determining the integrity of structures. Sensor network based SHM systems have been developed and tested for monitoring of assets such as pipelines. In this paper, details on the system and monitoring aspects are presented along with potential applications and benefits for critical assets.