<title>Crack detection on a full-scale aircraft fatigue test</title>

Abstract

This paper will present the findings from crack detection monitoring on the 777 full-scale aircraft during fatigue testing. Crack detection is a critical component of any comprehensive aircraft structural health-monitoring system. Health monitoring offers the promise of substantially reduced inspection and maintenance costs for military aircraft. To date, most testing has been performed in the laboratory on relatively small coupons and subcomponents. A persistent concern with broadband acoustic emission methods has been their ability to measure crack signals in the presence of noise. There is little broadband acoustic emission test data to provide any indication of the possible difficulties in monitoring a full-scale structure. This paper will present test data, results and discussion from broadband acoustic emission monitoring of the 777 Full-Scale Fatigue Test.

<title>Structural health management for aging aircraft</title>

“…Early Boeing internal work demonstrated that Broadband Acoustic Emission (BAE) systems had the capability to detect crack growth in structure. 3 A BAE system can autonomously monitor aircraft structure during operation and provide information necessary to detect crack growth, determine the source location and monitor the crack growth without structural disassembly.…”

YOLOv3-Lite: A Lightweight Crack Detection Network for Aircraft Structure Based on Depthwise Separable Convolutions

“…A resonant ultrasound spectroscopy apparatus was provided for detecting crack-like flaws in components in [2]. Searle et al applied an aircraft structural health-monitoring system to detect damaged areas in a full-scale aircraft fatigue tests [3]. Kadam et al [4] used a self-diagnosis technique to detect the cracking and de-bonding of the permanently embedded lead zirconate titanate (PZT).…”