In-service Structural Health Monitoring of a Full-scale Composite Horizontal Tail

In-service structural health monitoring（SHM） technologies are critical for the utilization of composite aircraft structures. We developed a Lamb wave-based in-service SHM technology using built-in piezoelectric actuator/sensor networks to monitor delamination extension in a full-scale composite horizontal tail. The in-service SHM technology combine of damage rapid monitoring（DRM） stage and damage imaging diagnosis（DID） stage allows for real-time monitoring and long term tracking of the structural integrity of composite aircraft structures. DRM stage using spearman rank correlation coeffi cient was introduced to generate a damage index which can be used to monitor the trend of damage extension. The DID stage based on canonical correlation analysis aimed at intuitively highlighting structural damage regions in two-dimensional images. The DRM and DID stages were trialed by an in-service SHM experiment of CFRP T-joint. Finally, the detection capability of the in-service SHM technology was verified in the SHM experiment of a full-scale composite horizontal tail. Experimental results show that the rapid monitoring method effectively monitors the damage occurrence and extension tendency in real time; damage imaging diagnosis results are consistent with those from the failure model of the composite horizontal tail structure.

The Influence of Aerodynamic Unsteady Effect on Maneuver Load of Aircraft Horizontal Tail

In this paper, the unsteady effect of airflow is introduced into the calculation of aircraft maneuver load, and the results are compared with those obtained by quasi-steady method. Taking the steep pitch maneuver of an aircraft as an example, two methods are used to calculate the aircraft response after the rudder input is given according to the specifications. The calculation results show that if the peak overload of the aircraft is the same, the horizontal tail load increases by about 1% when the unsteady effect of the airflow is taken into account. If the rudder input of the two methods is the same, the unsteady calculation method will increase more. At the same time, the calculation shows that the bigger the deflection speed of rudder surface is, the bigger the difference between them is. Therefore, in order to improve the design quality of aircraft, it is necessary to introduce the unsteady effect into the calculation of loads in the detailed design stage of aircraft.

Design of aircraft structures against threat of bird strikes

In this paper, a method to design bird-strike-resistant aircraft structures is presented and illustrated through examples. The focus is on bird strike experiments and simulations. The explicit finite element software PAM-CRASH is employed to conduct bird strike simulations, and a coupled Smooth Particles Hydrodynamic（SPH） and Finite Element（FE） method is used to simulate the interaction between a bird and a target structure. The SPH method is explained, and an SPH bird model is established. Constitutive models for various structural materials, such as aluminum alloys, composite materials, honeycomb, and foam materials that are used in aircraft structures,are presented, and model parameters are identified by conducting various material tests. Good agreements between simulation results and experimental data suggest that the numerical model is capable of predicting the dynamic responses of various aircraft structures under a bird strike,and numerical simulation can be used as a tool to design bird-strike-resistant aircraft structures.