Structural Health Monitoring on Metallic Aircrafts Using Flexible and Bulk PZT Transducers: Case of Corrosion Detection and Crack Localization

This work focus on the structural health monitoring of aircrafts parts specimen structures made of 2024 Aluminum alloys. In this paper we demonstrate the feasibility of a new non destructive control method capable to probe very large structures within a short time. The method we developed is based through a wide piezoelectric sensors network on a smart comparison between two acoustic signatures: the healthy structure response captured before the commissioning of the plane and “an after flight” response. The sensors network exploits the capability of piezoelectric patches to generate/measure specific Lamb wave’s modes. The system is therefore dynamically configured to localize mechanicals flaws using an algorithm that operates using different techniques like pitch-catch and pulse-echo. An analytic study is performed and tests to prove the proposed method feasibility on corroded structures specimens are provided at the end of this paper.