Optimal Sensor Fusion for Structural Health Monitoring of Aircraft Composite Components

Abstract

An integrated sensor system that continuously monitors the structural integrity of an aircraft s critical composite components can have a high payoff by reducing risks, costs, inspections, and unscheduled maintenance, while increasing safety. Hybrid sensor networks combine or fuse different types of sensors. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors can be inserted in layers of composite structures to provide local damage detection, while surface mounted Piezoelectric (PZT) sensors can provide global damage detection for the host structure under consideration. This paper describes an example of optimal sensor fusion, which combines FBG sensors and PZT sensors. Optimal sensor fusion tries to find the optimal number and location of different types of sensors such that their combined probability of detection (POD) is maximized. Optimal hybrid sensor networks can be more robust, more accurate, and/or cheaper than networks consisting only of homogenous sensors.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2011
Accession Number
ADA588271

Entities

People

  • Anish Ghoshal
  • G. S. Welsh
  • H. A. Winston
  • M. R. Gurvich
  • M. R. Urban
  • N. Bordick
  • S. Costiner
  • S. L. Butler

Organizations

  • United States Army Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Bragg Gratings
  • Composite Materials
  • Damage
  • Damage Detection
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Engineering
  • Fiber Bragg Gratings
  • Governments
  • Monitoring
  • Networks
  • Probability
  • Sensor Fusion
  • Sensor Networks
  • Structural Health Monitoring

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Image Processing and Computer Vision.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.