Development and application of an in-flight structural health monitoring system.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) represents a fast-growing field of great interest specially for aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering. This work proposes an in-flight SHM method for impact detection by ultrasounds, that is based on the dynamic behavior of the inspected structure and is useful to establish critical and dangerous operational conditions. The proposed method can be used to detect impact events both in metallic or composite structures, it is specifically designed to be used on typical fuselage and wing panels and is based on the propagation of Lamb waves in the structure on which PZT sensors are bonded for receiving signals. Algorithms are implemented in order to evaluate the impact location by post-processing the acquired signals. Several test cases are numerically studied before being tested in laboratory and reproduced in-flight. A good agreement between the numerical, laboratory and in-flight results is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]