The paper broadly addresses how Industry 4.0 program drivers will impact maintenance in aviation. Specifically, Industry 4.0 practices most suitable to aeronautical maintenance are selected, and a detailed exposure is provided. Advantages and open issues are widely discussed and case studies dealing with realistic scenarios are illustrated to support what has been proposed by authors. The attention has been oriented towards Augmented Reality and Additive Manufacturing technologies, which can support maintenance tasks and spare parts production, respectively. The intention is to demonstrate that Augmented Reality and Additive Manufacturing are viable tools in aviation maintenance, and while a strong effort is necessary to develop an appropriate regulatory framework, mandatory before the wide-spread introduction of these technologies in the aerospace systems maintenance process, there has been a great interest and pull from the industry sector. Highlights Industry 4.0 practices most suitable to aeronautical maintenance are selected. Advantages and open issues are widely discussed and case studies are illustrated. Augmented Reality can support maintenance tasks. Additive Manufacturing can be useful to produce spare parts. A strong effort is necessary to develop an appropriate aeronautical regulatory framework.

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The development of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based distributed strain sensor system for real time structural health monitoring of a wind turbine rotor and its validation under a laboratory scale test setup is discussed in this paper. A 1 kW, 1.6 m diameter rotor, horizontal axis wind turbine with three instrumented blades is used in this study. The sensor system consists of strain sensors, surface mounted at various locations on the blade. At first the sensors are calibrated under static loading conditions to validate the FBG mounting and the proposed data collection techniques. Then, the capability of the sensor system coupled with the operational modal analysis (OMA) methods to capture natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes in terms of distributed strains are validated under various non-rotating dynamic loading conditions. Finally, the sensor system is tested under rotating conditions using the wind flow from an open-jet wind tunnel, for both a baseline wind turbine and a wind turbine with a structurally modified blade. The blade was modified by attaching a lumped mass at the blade tip simulating structural damage or ice accretion. The dynamic characteristics of the baseline (healthy) blade and modified (altered) blade are compared to validate the sensor system’s ability for real time structural health monitoring of the rotor.