Session: 04-15-01: Congress-Wide Symposium on NDE & SHM – NDE and Prognostics in Structural Applications

Paper Number: 70153

Start Time: Tuesday, 10:15 AM

70153 - A Lightweight and Low-Power Consumption Mechatronic Smart Skin for Impact Monitoring of Aircraft Structures 

Aircraft smart skin can greatly improve the structural performance of advanced aircraft, such as the combat flight speed, operational maneuverability, and safety maintenance performance, through the integration of electronic network systems (ENSs) consisting of sensors, actuators, microprocessors, as well as signal wires, with large-scale skin structures of aircraft. Aircraft smart skin of structural health monitoring (SHM) is a very important type of aircraft smart skin and has been widely studied in recent years. However, considering the strict limitations of aerospace applications on weight, size, and power consumption, and the necessity of real-time continuous SHM, large-scale, lightweight, and low-power consumption have become three key problems that hinder the realization and engineering applications of aircraft SHM smart skin. Therefore, it's urgent to develop aircraft SHM smart skin that is lightweight, large-scale, and low-power consumption. In this paper, taking the impact monitoring of aircraft structure as the research object, a lightweight and low-power consumption mechatronic smart skin (MSS) with the ability of online continuous large-scale impact monitoring is proposed, developed, and validated. The principle and design of the MSS are proposed firstly, which is realized through the integration of large-scale flexible ENS and aircraft skin structure. Thus, the MSS can be seen as a complete mechatronic system that can acquire and process impact response signals and record impact results by itself. The ENS is composed of a large-scale PZT network and a flexible impact monitoring system (FIMS), so that it can be regarded as an ordinary piezoelectric sensor (referred to as PZT) network, as well as a complete impact monitoring network system. The FIMS can perform impact monitoring based on the digital sequence of impact response signals, which can greatly reduce the size, weight, and power consumption of FISM, realizing large-scale and low-power consumption impact monitoring. In addition, the mature flexible printed circuit (FPC) process is adopted to manufacture the flexible and lightweight ENS in a simple, large-scale, low-cost way. Then, through the vacuum-heat curing process, the ENS is further integrated with a carbon fiber reinforced composite plate with stiffeners as an MSS, for the implementation and validation of lightweight and low-power consumption impact monitoring ability. The validation results show that the MSS has a high impact monitoring correctness of 95%, a small additional weight of less than 55 g/m², and low power consumption introduced by the ENS of lower than 48 mW/m². The proposed MSS with integrated sensing and monitoring functions can further provide a new idea for the design of future aircraft smart skin.

Presenting Author: Yu Wang State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Authors:

Yu Wang State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Lei Qiu State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Xiaodong Lin State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Shenfang Yuan State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Wenli Shi State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics