With military aircraft are working harder and longer, the task of managing their service life safely and cost efficiently is becoming ever more critical. This has prompted Ultra Electronics Controls to conceive the ASIS aircraft structural integrity system, providing an innovative approach to monitoring and maintaining them.
ASIS, which is being launched here at the Farnborough airshow this week, is expected to provide more reliable and less time-consuming way to detect cracks anywhere in the airframe. It is based on passive acoustic detection technology that can detect extremely small cracks below the surface of aircraft structures in inaccessible places that would be difficult to access through existing nondestructive testing methods, such as eddy current and X-ray.
Sensors attached to the structure detect the acoustic emissions created by developing cracks, using piezo-electric sensors to listen for acoustic signals within a specific frequency bandwidth. The precise moment in time when each sensor detects each emission is analyzed and the noise generated by the crack is compared with the ASIS system’s permanent memory of the acoustic signature of that structure. ASIS then displays a 3-D illustration of the structure, showing the location and potential severity of each crack.
