Structural Health Assessment methods can accurately predict aerospace vehicle in-flight responses under multiple environmental conditions. Assessing the integrity of structures on a continuous real-time basis is very important for maintaining the safe flight of aerospace vehicles. The identification and reduction in uncertainties in critical geometry, materials, and environmental factors will enable high-fidelity health assessment and the estimation of residual useful life for condition-based maintenance. Probabilistic and statistical methods applied to health assessment will enable a reduction in the uncertainties in damage size and location, material properties, and loading. Thus, an increase in the remaining useful life can be achieved. Through collaboration with other branches, condition-based maintenance can be coupled with flight dynamics models; guidance, navigation, and control; and crew-system integrations for a robust assessment of vehicle health.
As a result, aviation safety is greatly improved through accurate and timely diagnosis of structural damage. Maintenance and vehicle downtime is reduced by replacing periodic maintenance and inspection with condition-based maintenance based on the health and usage of a particular vehicle.
Assessing the integrity of in-service structures on a continuous real-time basis is critical for maintaining safe flight of aerospace vehicles. The Structural Analysis and Health Assessment (SA&HA) team develops tools and methods that:
- Allows optimal use of the structure, minimizes downtime, and avoids catastrophic failures
- Drastically changes the work organization of maintenance services:
– By aiming to replace periodic maintenance inspection with performance-based (or condition-based) maintenance
– By drastically minimizing the human involvement, and consequently reducing labor, downtime and human errors, and thus improving safety and reliability.
If you would like more information on these topics, go to the link below, which is NASA’s technical report server: http://data.nasa.gov/nasa-technical-reports-server/
