STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING LAB

Structural Health Monitoring Lab

Structural Health Monitoring Laboratory is the state of art for facility of Advanced Composites Division for the development of Fiber Optic based Structural Health Monitoring technology for aircraft application. This consists of various instruments like FBG interrogators of various sampling Rate, Optic Loss Test Up, EXFO fiber optic test Bench, Optical Spectrum Analyser, NI PXIE based Instrumentation of strain, voltage acquisition, Image acquisition etc. along with Licensed LabVIEW software with Workstations for algorithm development and validation. Being interdisciplinary area of development, experts from structural analysis, Instrumentation and algorithm development are part of the group. Over years the group has developed expertise in sensor integration schemes to the structures, instrumentation, and algorithm development for load and damage detection and demonstrated from laminate level to aircrafts like NISHANT UAV and HANSA. FBG based online strain and load monitoring and distributed fiber optic sensor based ground based offline damage detection, image processing based surface damage detection are the main techniques the group is presently working on. Impact location prediction and force estimation, disbond detection and its demonstration on box level , Flight instrumentation of NISHANT, in house developed software for  flight data analysis are some of the key achievements of this facility   The group is also involved in the process monitoring during composite fabrication and developed and demonstrated Fiber optic based resin flow front monitoring for the VERITy process(Patent Filed) and presently working on detection of foreign body inclusion during prepreg lay up based composite fabrication. This facility is capable of using the spinoff of the technologies for the civil and geological applications.

Life Cycle of SHM System

Specifications

This facility consists of instrument like

1. FBG interrogators for ground level studies

   1. Micron Optics FBGLSI (100 Hz ,4 Channel)

   2. Micron Optic sm130 ( 1KHz, 4 Channel with multiplexer 16 Channel)

   3. Redento Optics ( 500 KHz, Single Channel 4 sensor)

   4. FOS&S Single Channel Handheld (1Hz)

2. FBG interrogator for in flight data acquisition ( 2.5KHz, 4 channel)

3. Distributed Fiber Optic system based on Rayleigh scattering (100 Hz, 5mm spatial resolution 10 m sensing length )

4. NI PXIe based strain and Voltage data acquisition ( 100 KHz, 24 Channel strain 8 channel voltage )

5. NI PXIe based frame grabber and camera

6. Test and measurement devices like Optical Spectrum Analyser, Fiber Optic Loss test, EXFO Fiber Optic test system, Visual Fault Locator,Mixed Signal Oscilloscope,Arbitrary Function Generator,Power Supply etc.

7.  Workstations with Licensed LabVIEW (VLM 5 seats  concurrent)

Major Clients of the facility: AR&DB, Airbus, DRDO

Projects Under taken: DISMAS Phase I and II, ACECOST Phase I, II, III, I2MC, CSIR Five Year Plan etc.

Instuments available in the facility

In house developed Software for data acquisition and analysis