Impact Monitoring for Aircraft Smart Composite Skins Based on a Lightweight Sensor Network and Characteristic Digital Sequences.

Lei Qiu,Yongan Huang,Shenfang Yuan,Xiaolei Deng,Yuanqiang Ren

doi:10.3390/s18072218

Abstract

Due to the growing use of composite materials in aircraft structures, Aircraft Smart Composite Skins (ASCSs) which have the capability of impact monitoring for large-scale composite structures need to be developed. However, the impact of an aircraft composite structure is a random transient event that needs to be monitored on-line continuously. Therefore, the sensor network of an ASCS and the corresponding impact monitoring system which needs to be installed on the aircraft as an on-board device must meet the requirements of light weight, low power consumption and high reliability. To achieve this point, an Impact Region Monitor (IRM) based on piezoelectric sensors and guided wave has been proposed and developed. It converts the impact response signals output from piezoelectric sensors into Characteristic Digital Sequences (CDSs), and then uses a simple but efficient impact region localization algorithm to achieve impact monitoring with light weight and low power consumption. However, due to the large number of sensors of ASCS, the realization of lightweight sensor network is still a key problem to realize an applicable ASCS for on-line and continuous impact monitoring. In this paper, three kinds of lightweight piezoelectric sensor networks including continuous series sensor network, continuous parallel sensor network and continuous heterogeneous sensor network are proposed. They can greatly reduce the lead wires of the piezoelectric sensors of ASCS and they can also greatly reduce the monitoring channels of the IRM. Furthermore, the impact region localization methods, which are based on the CDSs and the lightweight sensor networks, are proposed as well so that the lightweight sensor networks can be applied to on-line and continuous impact monitoring of ASCS with a large number of piezoelectric sensors. The lightweight piezoelectric sensor networks and the corresponding impact region localization methods are validated on the composite wing box of an unmanned aerial vehicle. The accuracy rate of impact region localization is higher than 92%.

Highlights

Aircraft smart skin is considered to be an important technology to improve the flight and safety performance of future advanced aircrafts [1,2,3,4,5]
To illustrate the impact region localization method based on the Continuous Series Sensor Network (CSSN)/Continuous Parallel Sensor Network (CPSN), a size of 3×3 region localization methods based on CSSN/CPSN and Continuous Heterogeneous Sensor Network (CHSN), respectively, are proposed as follows
To evaluateEvaluation the impact region localization methods based on CSSN/CPSN and CHSN, an

Summary

Introduction

Aircraft smart skin is considered to be an important technology to improve the flight and safety performance of future advanced aircrafts [1,2,3,4,5]. The basic principle of aircraft smart skin is to integrate a large number of sensors, actuators and microprocessors with the aircraft skin structure so that the flight environment, operational conditions, health status and other information of the aircraft structure can be monitored and the corresponding performance of the aircraft can be controlled adaptively. This can realize self-diagnosis, self-learning, self-healing and other capabilities of the aircraft structures. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is one of the key capabilities of an aircraft smart skin [3,4,5].

Methods

Results

Conclusion