A Data-Driven Digital Twin Approach for the Aging Prediction of Airworthiness of Aircraft Composite Components Accounting for Flight and Environmental

The main objective of this SBIR effort is two-fold. First, to develop a digital twin (DT) of an aircraft structure and its composite components capable of accurate aging predictions for any mission-specific loading and environmental variability, in a manner that enables the assessment of the structural airworthiness of the aircraft and its composite components from a damage tolerance perspective. Second, to identify potential multiphysics trade-offs to enable accelerated testing. To this end, the detailed technical objectives for Phase I are to: - Extend the multiphysics, data-driven modeling (MDD) approach developed at US-NRL to account for hygro-thermal coupling effects. - Incorporate MDD in the nonparametric probabilistic method (NPM) for modeling and quantifying model-form uncertainty, and apply the resulting MDD/NPM framework to data-enrich a finite element model of an aircraft structure and transform it into a DT. - Demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed MDD/NPM framework for predicting the structural airworthiness of an aircraft composite component from a damage tolerance perspective. - Extend MDD to the multiscale setting. - Investigate the influence of the choice of a witness component and its instrumentation on the trustworthiness of the DT for predicting damage effects in a composite component of interest.