Advanced Monitoring of Aircraft Coating Condition and Corrosion

Maintenance and sustainment are critical to structural integrity and availability of US Air Force aircraft. The first line of defense against corrosion is coatings and protection systems that provide barriers to the environment and inhibit corrosion of structural alloys. There are currently no methods or monitoring techniques to assess protection system condition, corrosive ingress into airframe structures, and nucleation of corrosion damage, other than the visual observations of corrosion. Advances in electrochemical and impedance based measurements, passive flexible electronics, and embedded sensor networks provide the means to address the critical need for direct measurements of protection system condition and corrosion of complex multilayer aircraft components. Impedance based measurements provide the capability to quantify barrier properties, coating cracking, and other coating mechanical damage that would allow environmental ingress into the airframe. Electrochemical measurements provide a means for assessing moisture, amount of inhibitor, and active corrosion. To support Air Force objectives, Luna proposes the development of an embedded, micro-electrode sensor array that performs continuous measurements of aircraft structures including coating condition including barrier properties, amount of remaining inhibitor, subsurface contaminants, and corrosion.