Accurate Damage Location and Identification in Composite Structures with Portable Unit

Current nondestructive methods for assessing structural damage and cracks/delaminations on aircraft are cumbersome, and require rigorous time-consuming testing. To overcome the limitations of conventional nondestructive inspection/evaluation, Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS), in collaboration with Professor Ajit Mal of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UCLA School of Engineering, proposes to develop a novel diagnostic/prognostic ultrasound imaging system for determining the location and degree of structural damage in composite aircraft materials. The proposed damage identification system will integrate damage data from an array of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor receivers with UCLA’s autonomous data analysis and identification system to develop a field usable, portable damage identification system. The sensor array will detect micro-amplitude high frequency vibrations in surfaces of large composite aircraft components, simultaneously, to detect damage in multiple locations. Microscopic fiber transducers are optimal for dense-gridded structural damage location in aircraft. In Phase I, IOS will demonstrate feasibility with FBG-based receivers on test composite panel structures and validate UCLA’s damage detection models. In Phase II, a complete working system will be implemented in a dense receiver array, to provide accurate damage location on actual components.