Trend analysis and visualisation of acousto-ultrasonic data from a metallic aircraft structure under cyclic loading

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Trend analysis and visualisation of acousto-ultrasonic data from a metallic aircraft structure under cyclic loading

Shark, L.K. / Zhang, Y. / Boller, C. / Leung, Y.S.

The paper starts with a brief description of a stiffened metallic aircraft fuselage panel selected for fatigue testing in terms of its structure, the acousto-ultrasonic system used for structural health monitoring, the measurement set-up based on a dense bi-directional multi-path active sensing network for data acquisition, and fatigue loading applied to the component. Signal analysis and processing of the acousto-ultrasonic signal acquired are then presented to extract the waveform envelope and phase in the area of interests. With the metallic aircraft panel tested until complete fracture, the whole life cycle trend analysis is shown using two different damage indices computed based on the differences the acousto-ultrasonic signals acquired at fixed intervals with respect to their baseline signals in terms of extracted waveform envelopes and phases. By using the physical geometry of the acousto-ultrasonic sensing network and combining damage indices associated with all sensing paths, the paper also presents the tomographic images constructed for visualisation of the changes in the metallic aircraft panel at different phases of the fatigue test. Consistent trends are shown to be produced by using only a small number of statistical parameters and constructed tomographic images, thereby informing the development of future work.