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The continued growth in air traffic has placed an increasing demand on the aerospace industry to manufacture aircraft at lower costs, while ensuring the aircrafts are friendly to the environment, and capable to operate for long times.
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To achieve these goals manufactures have to fight against oversizing and dead weights. At the same time aircraft must maintain the highest safety levels. Still, maintenance is performed on-schedule and is operator dependent. As a consequence, the demand of instruments able to assess structural health in real-time is rising fast. This is due to the time required for aircrafts’ inspection to detect impact damages. Since this safety critical task cannot be performed during flight, it impinges on companies’ performance increasing vehicle unavailability.
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Intelligent Structures eases these problems by introducing a network of small embedded sensors directly under the skin of the airplane. Our sensors are as small as a coin, as light as a sheet of paper and consume such a small amount of power that 1000 of them would still consume less than a traditional light bulb.
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By including these sensors in new designs or by retrofitting existing airplanes, manufactures will be able to add auto-diagnosis capabilities by efficiently performing precise impact damage location. This will pave the road to a shift in the maintenance paradigm, from on-schedule to on-condition.
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