ASHMOSD - Austrian Structural Health Monitoring System Demonstrator

For the reduction of weight the concept of „Damage Tolerant Design“ has been successfully implemented in the aeronautic industry since several years. This concept is based on the idea, that a certain amount of defects can be tolerated in a structural component, before it has to be repaired or exchanged To guaranty the structural integrity of such a component continuous non destructive inspections have do been done, leading to down times of aircrafts. In addition the amount of structural components made of CFRP has been increased strongly in the last decade, but their potential has not been exhausted due to uncertainties in the production process and the prediction of the residual life (higher safety factors compared to metal structures)

If such a non-destructive inspection system could be permanently applied to structures of interest especially to composite structures and operated online (Structural Health Monitoring), especially in distributed and difficult to access areas, a strong reduction in the down time and subsequent costs of maintenance and also a reduction in weight could be expected.

Goal of the project ASHMOSD is the development, implementation, verification and qualification of an the usage performance of an AUSTRIAN Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system for damage (delamination) detection implemented in a real size demonstrator component made of CFRP. In order to realize such a complex multidisciplinary project an Austrian SHM consortium under the coordination of the division AMAT of the ARC including the most decisive Austrian partners from research and industry and an OEM has been founded.