PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The overarching objective of this project is to establish the needs and develop a breadboard demonstration of an in-situ health monitoring technique for Carbon Fibre Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs) for both high pressure and low pressure (hazardous) propellants.
The overarching objective is broken down into a list of specific objectives:
- To identify the requirements for health monitoring of composites in terms of the level of sensitivity, accuracy, robustness to damage (of the sensors and / or data capture system) and reliability of the system that would allow a significant reduction in the thickness (and therefore mass) of the composite overwrap, and reliability in terms of preventing false positive failure modes.
- To collect information on potential sensors and sensor systems, and create a short list of candidate technologies that could be utilized.
- To design the selected sensor / sensor system into a breadboard demonstrator, with the appropriate performance in terms of representativity of a “flight tank” and available sensors.
- To demonstrate the maturity and feasibility of the designed concept.
Challenges
To design selected sensor system / systems into breadboard demonstrator several issues must be resolved:
- selection of sensor with appropriate parameters
- design of the sensor network topology
- specification of data acquisition parameters
- development of signal processing algorithms
This work is done using surrogate specimen with the same or very similar material properties as the COPV’s overwrap. Then, the sensor system design is incorporated into overall conceptual design and tested for the application in the COPV.
Plan
The work is divided into three phases in sequential order:
- State of the art (finishing April 2013)
- Assessment of COPV design with respect to specification for health monitoring
- Survey of current and potential sensor capabilities and their detailed trade-off
- Design and development of a breadboard demonstrator for the selected sensor systems (finishing November 2013)
- Manufacturing the demonstrator and reporting results of designed performance tests (finishing August 2014)
The outputs of the three phases cover all technical notes and hardware required in the state of work.
Current Status
The project was completed.
All the defined research objectives were met. The breadboard demonstrator proved feasibility of the proposed manufacturing process and a series of impact tests verified detection capabilities of the sensors network. It was demonstrated that both invetigated SHM technologies (FBG and PZT) are able to detect structural defects on the tested composite overwrap.
Companies
