STRUCTURAL RELIABILITY PROGNOSIS AND HEALTH ASSESSMENT OF AIRFRAMES USING NONDESTRUCTIVE INSPECTION

摘要

This paper describes part of a multi-year effort in prognosis and health monitoring (PHM) at the University of Maryland, College Park. The objective of this PHM effort is to develop a Bayesian framework based on mechanistic failure models and non-destructive inspection data to estimate airframe reliability and risks, and to support fleet management of aging aircraft. The ultimate goal is to develop an integrated probabilistic framework for utilizing all available information to better predict (with less uncertainty) risks and structural health of the aircraft. Such information includes fatigue models and test data, health monitoring measurements and inspection field data. Despite significant achievements in the modeling of crack growth behavior using fracture mechanics, it is still of great interest to findrnpractical techniques for monitoring the crack growth instances using non-destructive inspections and to integrate such inspection results with the fracture mechanics models. In the work presented in this paper, a probabilistic damage-tolerance model based on acoustic emission (AE) monitoring is proposed to enhance the reliability and risk prediction for structures subject to fatigue cracking.