SHM system for bonding line monitoring of composite wing box skin-spar cap during manufacturing

Abstract

The CFRP wing box section under investigation is a stringer less wing-box (develop within the OPTICOMS research project) and consists of two portions: an upper part, made of co-cured spars and a top skin panel, and a bottom cured skin panel. The two portions are joined with a bonding process, giving rise to the final wing-box. During that final assembly step, distributed fibre optics were embedded between the spar caps and the bottom skin panel along the bonding lines. The embedded FO consists of six distributed fibres running within the bonding layer for about 1 m along the span direction. An irregular damage map was defined, by simulating the presence of manufacturing bonding defects by the intersection of teflon patches, different for width and length, to check an SHM system capabilities in detecting such flaws. The SHM system was tested after the final bonding process, by exploring the info contained within the “residual strains” data of the unloaded structure. Results obtained by post processing data for each fibre optic, are reported. The damage index associated to the eligible sensors is provided. Based on the available data, the SHM algorithm appeared to be sensible enough to hundreds of microstrain signals. Concerning faults detection, sensor density seems a key. Errors in the estimate of the damage extension can be assessed to be around 25%

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