Intelligent, Adaptive Structural-Integrity Assessment System

Composites may be used as high-strength, low-weight structural componenent with material properties tailorable to specific applications, while fiber optic sensing technology provides a means for sensing various properties such as stress, strain and elasticity. These composite structures may degrade due to improper manufacture, duty cycle wear, impacts, and material corrosion. While embedded sensors provide a means for gathering vast quantities of data relating to the structural and dynamic history of composite structures, it is necessary to process, integrate, and interpret this information if the embedded sensors are to be useful in determining structural integrity. This effort will utilize advanced neural network based techniques for modeling and analyzing dynamic structural information, as well as neural network classifiers for performing real-time sensor interpretation and sensor fusion. This will yield an adaptable, intelligent system to give a robust, accurate measure of structural integrity for thick-section composite structures