Structural Health Management: Systems Design Approach

Structural Health Management (SHM) and its related technologies offer the combined benefits of reducing maintenance costs while maintaining or improving structural design performance. SHM implementation for in-service aerospace platforms requires an approach to quantify how each application can provide benefits. A clear understanding from a benefits perspective provides insight to optimize SHM system design. The focus of this paper will be to describe the key aspects of SHM design from a large scale systems integration perspective. This will be accomplished by a brief overview of SHM from a design and integration perspective, followed by a discussion of SHM derived requirements in the context of example applications. Detailed assessments of a particular application often uncover very stringent requirements to meet existing design, operational performance, qualification, and certification criteria. This paper will discuss a design framework to more quickly understand these requirements and how to best address them by trading technology along with design criteria and possibly criteria change. The design framework will be discussed in the context of example applications, including: 1) considerations for changing inspection intervals based on load and environmental monitoring, 2) design considerations for damage diagnostics and prognostics, and 3) an example of a structural design criteria change that enables condition based maintenance.