Skipping unnecessary structural airframe maintenance using an on-board structural health monitoring system
Résumé
Structural airframe maintenance is a subset of scheduled maintenance, and is performed at regular intervals to detect and repair cracks that would otherwise affect the safety of the airplane. It has been observed that only a fraction of airplanes undergo structural airframe maintenance at earlier scheduled maintenance times. But, intrusive inspection of all panels on the airplanes needs to be performed at the time of scheduled maintenance to ascertain the presence/absence of large cracks critical to the safety of the airplane. Recently, structural health monitoring techniques have been developed. They use on-board sensors and actuators to assess the current damage status of the airplane, and can be used as a tool to skip the structural airframe maintenance whenever deemed unnecessary. Two maintenance philosophies, scheduled structural health monitoring and condition-based maintenance skip, have been developed in this article to skip unnecessary structural airframe maintenances using the on-board structural health monitoring system. A cost model is developed to quantify the savings of these maintenance philosophies over scheduled maintenance.