Wireless sensing for aircraft health monitoring
Integrated vehicle health monitoring of aircrafts is needed to enhance flight safety and at the same time reduce operational and maintenance costs. However, a series of constraints prevent the incorporation of such instrumentation onto aircraft. The size, resources and energy required were addressed by the EU-funded project 'Wireless smart distributed end system for aircraft' (WILDCRAFT)(opens in new window). By developing a wireless sensor network based on data fusion techniques for the analysis of measurements taken in specific parts of an aircraft, WILDCRAFT has made it possible to detect anomalies with greater confidence. Researchers have developed an end-to-end solution for collecting, analysing and producing actionable information. The wireless sensors chosen for the health monitoring system work well in a range of temperature, acceleration and humidity conditions. They are relatively small in size and weight as well as energy efficient. Furthermore, a thermal harvester eliminates the need to charge batteries by harvesting electrical power generated by the temperature difference with the surrounding air. Wireless connectivity links every sensor to a central computation node consisting of a network-enabled processor with high-performance cores and a complete set of peripherals. Although capable of processing large amounts of data, a field-programmable gate array has been added to accelerate certain very demanding tasks. With the recorded data and newly developed data fusion algorithms, the WILDCRAFT system can identify the exact state of the aircraft structure. Taking advantage of various levels of data redundancy allows obtaining high-fidelity virtual sensing information. More importantly, the new system plays to the respective strengths of different types of sensors. The current practice of scheduled maintenance increases the cost of maintenance, especially in the case of aircraft flying beyond their designed service life. Condition-based maintenance that is now possible with the new WILDCRAFT health monitoring system will increase asset availability and return on investment while ensuring safety.
