Sensors for Through-Life Engineering

This Fellowship will develop new approaches to verifying and validating sensor concepts for assessing the integrity and status of engineering products and systems throughout their lifecycles, in particular with respect to structural health management (SHM). Such condition monitoring technology is vital for health management of high value and safety critical systems and structures. No coherent approach for its verification and validation yet exists. Moreover, the ability to closely monitor engineering assets with increasing detail and pervasiveness offers a path to revolutionary new design concepts where health monitoring functionality can be incorporated into the fundamental manufacturing design philosophies. This fellowship addresses both of these themes. They are linked by the common need for completely dependable sensing throughout the life of the product. The Fellowship will help establish a strong academic career for the applicant while exploiting his knowledge and long experience at the heart of manufacturing industry and his unique expertise in research, development and validation of sensors for manufacturing applications.

New approaches will be developed for efficiently validating emerging sensing concepts through experimental and model based methods firmly linked to the end-use and operational requirements. It will provide a framework in which devices and systems at preliminary stages of development can be 'road-tested' to aid decisions early in the device development. In addition, the impact of built-in sensing function on fundamental design principles and production/manufacturing techniques for selected engineering products will be explored and demonstrated at laboratory scale.

In achieving this, the research will fill a perceived gap in the UK between technology focussed research in sensor techniques in universities and industrial R&D and the end user requirements and constraints. The Fellowship will act as a springboard for creating a new capability in the UK at Cranfield University for experimental verification and validation of condition monitoring sensors with multi-industry relevance. The Fellowship will allow creation of a novel body of scientific knowledge in sensor verification while drawing together many of the strands of current, ad-hoc industry and research experience. The capacity of in-built sensing to transform approaches to design and through-life sustainment of engineering systems such as safety critical structures will also be revealed and demonstrated as part the work.

The five year research programme is intended to establish the applicant as an academic leader and will exploit his long experience in industry to influence and create new thinking within the university environment. His thought leadership exercised by interaction with the other EPSRC and IVHM centres at Cranfield as well as teching, will help bridge the gap between academic research and beneficiaries by linking user needs in respect of health monitoring technologies with the fundamantals of through-life processes from design and manufacture to life extension. It will generate further high quality research relating to through life engineering and manufacture.

Benefits will be accrued in the medium to long term (5 - 10 years)
Who will benefit from the research?
Beneficiaries as outlined in the are:
1. Universities (e.g. Aston, Heriot-Watt, Southampton, Cranfield) involved in the early development of concepts involving physical sensors. It will provide the ability to benchmark and conduct trade studies with alternative techniques using the V&V framework developed in this work at Cranfield.
2. Technology supplier industries (e.g. Meggitt, Smart Fibres, Oxensys, QinetiQ) can use the knowledge and capability in early phases of their product development hence benefiting from the Cranfield approach. It would enable them more efficiently to de-risk and position their products for end-users.
3. OEMs and systems integrator industries (e.g. BAE Systems, Boeing, EADS, Rolls-Royce, Bombardier) who may wish to benchmark supplier technology can use the V&V framework developed in this work from a commercially impartial scientific and technical hub.

Further beneficiaries are stakeholders in industry standards and communities of practice. The Applicant is chairman of the SAE International Standards group on Structural Health Monitoring for aerospace applications. The interested parties include indtrial OEMS (Boeing, Airbus, EADS, BAE Systems, Bombardier, Embraer, Systems integrators: Honeywell, Goodrich, Research Institutes NASA, Sandia, Stanford University, End-user operators US Navy and Airforce, Airlines, Regulators: FAA and EASA. This standards group has a particular interest in promoting industry accepted practices and eventual standards for SHM.

Other beneficiaries will be any service provider or industries that conduct manual inspection of structures. The work of this fellowship supports the automation of that processes leading to substantial benefits and efficiencies.

How will they benefit?.
The above will benefit in the following manner:

1. Universities and other research groups: the research output will provide the ability to benchmark and conduct trade studies with alternative techniques using the V&V framework developed in this work at Cranfield.

2. Technology supply industries: can use the knowledge and capability in early phases of their product development hence benefiting from the Cranfield approach. It would enable them more efficiently to de-risk and position their products for end-users.

3. OEMs and system integrators: who may wish to benchmark supplier technology can use the V&V framework developed in this work in the knowledge that it originates from a commercially impartial, scientific and technical hub.

In general terms, any practitioners of manual inspection of structures will benefit from the automation of the techniques as underpinned by this research. It will enable maintenance in which scheduled manual inspections can be replaced by automated continuous diagnosis. This will remove the need for disruptive inspection tasks where assets must be taken out of commission and partially dismantled to be inspected. In such precautionary maintenance, the most common outcome is 'no-fault-found'. With reliable built-in sensing, the benefits would be:

A. Assets only need to be taken out of operation when maintenance is actually required.
The maintenance requirements can be predicted and managed to optimise the resources required and minimise disruption.
B. Fewer unnecessary interventions prolong the lifetime of the asset by avoiding maintenance induced damage and promoting preventative maintenance.
C. Less exposure of personnel to potentially dangerous environments (confined spaces, presence of contaminants, etc..) while performing unnecessary maintenance tasks.
D. Reduction in creation of waste (for example tear down of aircraft structures for inspection liberates environmentally harmful chromates from corrosion prevention layers).
E. Smaller logistic footprints for leaner maintenance and support operations.