Work

An enhanced probability signal construction based on-line damage imaging method for aircraft structures under service environment

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: • GMM based enhanced probability signal construction for reliable damage representation under EOCs. • Sparse sampling and reconstruction method which greatly reduce computational cost. • Validations under −50 °C to 80 °C show the effectiveness, with the max localization error of 1.0 cm. Guided wave (GW) based structural health monitoring (SHM) has been embraced as an effective technology to improve aircraft safety and maintenance efficiency. However, one of the main challenges hindering SHM from practical applications is the monitoring reliability under time-varying environmental and operational conditions (EOCs), which will introduce obvious uncertainties in GW signals and may mask the subtle changes caused by damage. Aiming at this issue, this paper proposes an enhanced probability signal construction based imaging method to realize reliable on-line damage monitoring of aircraft structures under time-varying EOCs. A new two-dimensional signal feature is defined to construct the probability signal without EOCs caused uncertain influence, and enhance its reliability of representing damage, by building Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and measuring the probability distribution migration during the monitoring process. Besides, a sparse sampling and reconstruction based on-line imaging method is then proposed to realize accurate damage localization and significantly reduce the computational cost at the same time. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, cracks and loosen bolts monitoring experiments on a typical aircraft porous structure are carried out under temperature variation from -50 °C to 80 °C. The results demonstrate that the proposed method realizes reliable imaging and localization of crack and loosen bolt under time-varying temperature environment, the maximal localization error of the two types of damages is <1.0 cm.

Source: Aerospace Science and Technology

DOI: 10.1016/j.ast.2025.110787

Authors: Yuanqiang Ren, Jiaxuan Li, Shenfang Yuan, Lei Qiu, Limin Gao, Mingyu Lu

Institutions: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (China)

Language: English

Topic: Ultrasonics and Acoustic Wave Propagation

Subfield: Mechanics of Materials

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $4,360