On 7th november, the MORPHO Project held its second of three online workshops showcasing “Advances in Structural Health Monitoring: Innovation and value creation in aeronautics”. Expert speakers presented their work and the advancements achieved by consortium members in the SHM field.
Introduction
Welcomimg and first words were given by Nazih Mechbal, Professor and director of the Processes and Engineering in Mechanics and Materials Laboratory (PIMM – UMR CNRS) at Arts et Métiers institute of technology (Paris), who also encouraged the audience to attend the Morpho Final Conference, scheduled for 30th January in Vigo, Spain. Together with Elena Sánchez García, an aeronautical engineer at EASA, they co-moderated this workshop.
SHM and Value Making for Aeronautics in an Evolving Environment
This presentation, made by Oscar D’Almeida, Program Manager at Safran, discusses how a global approach could help to create value while being compliant with safety and sustainability requirements. The basic concept of SHM is to acquire and analyse data from on-board sensors to determine the health of a structure and enable condition-based maintenance. To reach such a goal, SHM must be viable, reliable and to deal with validation and certification concerns. With society’s needs for safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly air transport, there is a need of evolving global approach for SHM with all stakeholders and for the whole lifecycle of equipment and structures.
The Importance and Benefits of SHM for the Aerospace Industry
This presentation, made by George Glanopoulos, Post Doctoral Researcher at TU Delft, explains the need for increased safety and availability, so SHM sensors can provide the necessary data that can be converted to meaningful information for a shift to a condition-based maintenance scheme. However, the are several challenges involved until the technology is ready to be implemented. In this presentation, the benefits, and challenges of SHM towards condition-based maintenance are outlined, discussed, and explained through a challenging case study on aircraft engine blade subcomponents. Degradation is quantified by the drop of the structure’s stiffness and FBG sensor data are used to demonstrate that SHM can be used to monitor degradation.
Lamb Wave-Based SHM of Composite Aeronautic Structures
This presentation, made by Marc Rebillat, Associate Professor at Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology, focuses on a very promising technology based on Lamb waves and allowing to monitor in-situ the health of composite aeronautics structures. The working principle of the technology will be highlighted as well as recent achievements related to damage monitoring (detection, localization & quantification steps). Additionally, current challenges faced by this technology preventing it to move from the laboratory to industrial exploitation will be discussed. Finally, opportunities offered by new printed transducers technologies and by the co-monitoring using FBG sensors will be addressed.
A Deep Learning-Based Pipeline for Structural Diagnostics and PrognosticS
This presentation, made by Giannis Stamatelatos, PhD Student at University of Patras, talks about the stochastic nature of composite structures that complicates analytical RUL prediction models, necessitating data-driven approaches for real-time operations. Traditional Deep Learning methods require extensive preprocessing, manual feature engineering, and mathematical constraints, limiting their use. This study proposes a novel approach for real-time RUL estimation, leveraging sensor data and pretrained models to capture complex patterns automatically. Our streamlined method processes raw sensor data, extracting features without manual effort and adapting easily to new datasets. Testing identified 1D Inception Convolutions as highly effective, achieving good results even with limited data. This work advances predictive maintenance with efficient, real-time RUL estimation for composite components.
SHM Probability of Detection: certification outlook
This presentation, made by Elena Sánchez Garcia, Aeronautical Engineer at European Aviation Safety Agency, serves as an introduction to the SAE ARP about to be published on probability of detection, and some related, more generic aspects to take into account for certification.