In-situ quantitative monitoring of fatigue crack using fastest time of flight diffraction method

Abstract

Due to the cyclic loading and longtime exposure under extreme environment conditions, fatigue cracks often generate in the aircraft metal structures, i.e. wing skin, fuselage skin, strigners, pylons. These cracks could cause severe damages to the aircraft structures. Thus the position and size monitoring of fatigue cracks in the metal structures is very important to manufacturers as well as maintenance personnel for significantly improving the safety and reliability of aircraft. Much progress has been made for crack position monitoring in the past few years. However, the crack size monitoring is still very challenging. Fastest time of flight diffraction (FTOFD) method was developed to monitor both the position and size of a crack. FTOFD method uses an integrated sensor network to activate and receive ultrasonic waves in a structure. Diffraction waves will be generated when the ultrasonic waves pass a crack. These diffraction waves are received and analyzed to get the position and size of the crack. The experiment results show that the monitored size of the simulated crack is very close to the real size of the crack, and for frequencies of 350 and 400 kHz, the monitoring errors are both smaller than 5%.