Reviews of Structural Health Monitoring Technologies in Airplane Fuselage Maintenance Perspective

摘要

Although sensor technologies have significantly been developed for aircraft structural health monitoring, their practicality must be considered in the industrial maintenance perspective. In this paper, the current sensor technologies are reviewed based on the literature in terms of accuracy, detection range, and weight. After selecting the most promising sensor technology, a case study is presented for the maintenance of aircraft fuselage panels. The numbers of sensors and wire connectors are determined in order to maintain the same level of accuracy as conventional damage detection method in C-check. The cost-benefit of sensor-based inspection comes from saving maintenance time of removing/reinstalling internal structures to access the load-carrying structures. However, the lifetime cost may increase due to losing the payload by the weight of sensors, cables and connectors, even using a very conservative estimate. In order to make the sensor-based inspection cost effective, it is necessary to improve the current sensor technology so that sensors can detect a small sized damage in a long distance. In addition, it is necessary to design aircraft structures considering the sensor-based inspection in order to take full advantages of the technology.