Structural health monitoring for multi-strand aircraft wire insulation layer based on ultrasonic guided waves

Aircraft wire insulation layer with defects can cause serious accidents that threaten the life of the people on board. Compared with the traditional aircraft wire detection methods, an on-line detection for multi -strand aircraft wire (MSAW) based on ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) is proposed. In this paper, the propagation characteristics of UGWs in MSAW are investigated by numerical simulations and experi-ments. In the experiment, a 5 cycles Hanning window modulated sinusoidal waves with a center fre-quency of 20 KHz is employed as excitation signal. The experimental results show that this method effectively detect 4 different types of defects in a 3-strand aircraft wire and the maximum defect location relative error is 1.6 %. The amplitude of defect reflected echoes decrease as the axial length and circum-ferential ratio of these defects increased from 2 mm to 10 mm and 12.5 % to 100 %, respectively. An inter-esting phenomenon is found that the defects reflection energy in a wire can be acquired in other wires which shows that UGWs energy disperse among wires. The experiment successfully detected each defect in the MSAW, proving the effectiveness of the proposed method.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an online detection method for multi-strand aircraft wire (MSAW) based on ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs). The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in detecting wire defects and investigate the influence of different defect characteristics.