Structural Health Monitoring of Aircraft Wing Using Wireless Network

The usage of composites in aircraft industry has enormously increased over the past few decades and has led to the development of modern trends. This improves the cutting edge technology which provides an outsourcing service from designing to manufacturing. This study is concerned with the detection and characterization of hidden defects in composite structures before they grow to a critical size. Its immediate application is in the health monitoring of aircraft structure in order to detect crack, corrosion and fatigue stress-strain. A methodology for damage identification is developed by using Lamb wave propagations. Lamb wave techniques provide more information about damage presence and severity than previously tested methods (Frequency Response Techniques). A piezoelectric actuators and sensors network could fulfill the required monitoring tasks concerning fatigue, damage (or) stress of structural parts. A six layered glass fiber composite was manufactured with piezoelectric (PZT) sensors embedded on it. The specimen was tested for wireless network for data transmission and was found successful.