STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF LARGE SCALE COMPOSITE STRUCTURES USING THE STRUCTURAL IRREGULARITY AND DAMAGE EVALUATION ROUTINE

摘要

The U.S. Navy has fielded, and is currently developing, several large-area composite structures for fleet implementation. Conventional nondestructive inspection (NDI) methods, such as the commonly employed ultrasonic methods, are limited in their capabilities to inspect these composite structures due to their large size, difficult accessibility, and instrumentation portability. In addition, the complexity of the construction used, which includes thick cores and multilayer composite structures, complicate inspection with standard ultrasonic methods. Techniques to provide rapid nondestructive inspection of large area composite structural components are required for these applications. An inspection technique, Structural Irregularity and Damage Evaluation Routine, SIDER, has been developed by the Navy, U.S Patent 6,799,126, to rapidly interrogate entire structures and locate areas of stiffness variation that result from processing anomalies and in-service damage. SIDER has been used to locate damage related features in numerous large scale structures including a Vi scale composite Corvette Hull section, the M80 Stiletto composite hull, the Composite Twisted Rudder, an Airbus A320 vertical stabilizer, and a composite road bridge. SIDER has been shown to rapidly locate areas on a structure where structural degradation has occurred. Current developments include the extension of this technique to in-service structural health monitoring of composite structures. This paper will present examples of where this technology has been used and discuss current development efforts to allow SIDER to interrogate composite structures in the service environment.