Health monitoring of a composite wingbox structure

This work was devoted to the development of a health monitoring system assigned to aerospace applications. Those applications concerned the detection of damaging impacts and debonding between stiffeners and composite skins, since they are the major causes of in-service damage of aircraft structures. The chosen health monitoring system was first based on the excitation and reception of Lamb waves along the structure by using thin piezoelectric transducers (active mode) and secondly on a continuous monitoring taking the same transducers used as acoustic emission sensors (passive mode). The composite specimen used was consistent with aircraft wingbox in terms of structure and loading. Several impacts with increasing energy increments were applied on the composite specimen. In passive mode, the study showed the ability of using the acoustic signature of an impact to detect possible damage. Moreover, the damage emergence in the case of damaging impact was confirmed in active mode. Further measurements during fatigue testing were performed. The aim was to demonstrate the ability of the system to monitor disbond growth between the stiffener and the composite skin. The sensitivity of the health monitoring system to the disbond growth was further demonstrated. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.