The United States Air Force utilizes the Aircraft Structural Integrity Program (ASIP) to service and maintain its airframes. This schedule-based maintenance approach works well for ensuring system integrity; however, it is very costly, labor-intensive and it reduces system availability. As a result, the Air Force intends to transition to a process that services aircraft based on their actual condition instead of the presumptive schedule-based approach. Structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies ...
Corrosion inspection and repair accounts for 21% of the total maintenance costs averaged over the Army, Navy, and Marine air and ground vehicles. A reliable automated method for inspection can lead to cost reductions due to avoiding unnecessary tear down and re-assembly. Elastic waves can travel across relatively large distances in plate-like structures and are affected by the presence of corrosion. This paper presents an investigation of the interaction of ...
Aircraft structural components may have known hot spots where any initial damage is anticipated to occur or has consistently been observed in the field. Automated inspection of these areas, or hot spot monitoring, may offer significant time and cost savings for aircraft maintainers, particularly when the hot spots exist in areas that are difficult to access or where traditional NDE inspection methods will not work. This paper discusses the development ...
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