Empa looking into microcracks in aircraft

The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) is working with its project partners Airbus, the University of Liverpool in addition to the companies Strain Solutions Limited from the UK and Dantec Dynamics GmbH in Germany to develop a monitoring system for airplane components. This is designed to uncover minor damage such as microcracks during a flight in addition to tracking and analyzing their development. Ultimately, this could help to reduce aircraft maintenance costs and increase flight safety.

At present, pressurized cabins, wings and tail units of commercial aircraft are examined for evidence of such damage every six to ten years. For this, the aircraft are stationed in a hangar for one to two months, where it is largely disassembled, Empa writes in the press release. The module developed by the researchers to monitor damage can, in contrast, be deployed during flight operations.

In the development process behind the module, Empa played “no small role”, the press release explains further. On the one hand, project manager Erwin Hack brought to the table his extensive expertise in the areas of optical monitoring of components and thermal imaging measurements in addition to monitoring by way of strain gauges and Bragg gratings, while on the other hand, Empa provided the machinery that allowed the examined parts to be deliberately bent thousands of times in a row.

“The result of the project is a small module made of commercially available, low-cost components” that works with the four monitoring methods of “strain measurements with measuring strips and Bragg sensors, optical monitoring and thermoelastic stress analysis”, Empa explains. The data delivered by the sensors can also be read remotely. In a next step, the module will undergo testing at the Airbus development labs in order to demonstrate its capabilities.