Airbus and Boeing have joined an international aerospace group launched last week to promote industry-wide co-operation on the development of structural health monitoring (SHM) technology.
The group is interested in sensor-actuator networks that could automatically assess the integrity of aircraft structures to reduce maintenance costs and downtime by ending manual inspections.
The Structural Health Monitoring - Aerospace Industry Steering Committee (SHM-AISC), which consists of industry, military, government, regulatory and academic organisations, will set out a way of implementing SHM for commercial and military aerospace applications.
To be set up this month, the committee's working groups will develop standards, procedures, processes and guidelines for SHM implementation and certification. The first working group to be established, for commercial aviation, expects to produce draft standards within the next two years.
"We're talking about building a nervous system for aircraft. SHM technologies can give maintenance professionals information about what is going on in an aircraft's structure whenever it is needed," says Stanford University professor of aeronautics and astronautics Fu-Kuo Chang, SHM-AISC chairman.
Airbus views SHM as key to its "intelligent structure philosophy" and Boeing has identified it as an emerging technology that may provide significant improvements in operational efficiencies.
As well as its aircraft, the US Air Force wants SHM for its reusable Space Operations Vehicle, to enable the health of the entire structure to be assessed within hours of a completed mission to recertify it for another immediate flight.
The SHM-AISC international management board includes Airbus, Boeing, BAE Systems, Embraer, Honeywell, the US Federal Aviation Administration and Europe's European Aviation Safety Agency, the USAF, US Army, NASA, and the US government's Sandia National Laboratories and Stanford University.
Source: Flight International
