Operational Loads Monitoring and CFRP Damage Accumulation for Predictive Maintenance

Abstract

A flexible aircraft maintenance scheme based on predictive maintenance allows a higher structural uti-lization. This leads to reduced mass for new aircraft designs or longer maintenance intervals for existingaircraft. Current aircraft are designed to endure predefined operating load and to fulfil standard main-tenance requirements with fixed intervals for damage inspection. For a predictive maintenance, theutilization the actual load history of an aircraft as well as evaluating the development of a damage will beanalysed. The workflow in figure 1 uses the concept of a digital twin by evaluating data from on-boardsensors. The Operational Loads Monitoring System (OLMS) transforms this data into operating globalloads. These are converted to local strain spectra and fed into a damage tolerance calculation estimatingthe remaining useful life (RUL) of a structur