Designing for Lamb Wave Based In Situ Structural Health Monitoring

The incorporation of in situ structural health monitoring is currently an after-thought used to address critical areas identified in testing or service. This paper reports on a series of analytical/experimental work seeking to demonstrate the implementation of in situ structural health monitoring (iSHM) at the design stage of critical structures. This work is intended for the design of future generation aircraft. The work presented describes a systematic redesign scheme based on Lamb wave technology. The results demonstrate a strong possibility that such a system is effective and feasible and comes at a tolerable cost to the structure. To demonstrate the efficacy of this proposed design scheme, a series of experimental results will be presented using the fatigue critical location of structure representing the lower wing skin of an aircraft structure as a test case.