Structural Health Monitoring

Structural Health Management (SHM) is a key part of the Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) approach, whose main aim is to develop an integrated end-to-end system to monitor the overall health of a vehicle.

Structural Health Monitoring: Current State and Future Trends, edited by Professor Alessandro Pegoretti, a scholar from the University of Trento in Italy, introduces the reader to recent developments involved in health monitoring of aerospace structures. The chapters, represented by seminal SAE International technical papers, offer an overview of the most recent advances in the sensing techniques for SHM, analysis of SHM data and its applications in aerospace.

SHM can allow a continuous in-service inspection of the vehicle, thus reducing the cost associated with manual inspection at predetermined time intervals.

The availability of reliable information on the loading conditions and health state of structural components by the implementation of SHM can be beneficial for several reasons, such as:

• To prevent catastrophic failure
• To reduce the number and the cost of unnecessary inspections
• To improve the design of structural parts, with a reduction of the weight and the costs of overdesigned components

Structural Health Monitoring: Current State and Future Trends offers a unique perspective on this field.