A Systems Engineering Approach to Integrated Structural Health Monitoring for Aging Aircraft

The United States Air Force and many of its Coalition partners have extended the original service life of some of their aging aircraft due to fiscal constraints. This life extension often requires increased periodic and in-depth inspections, increasing maintenance costs and resulting in longer periods of aircraft downtime. An integrated structural health monitoring system (ISHMS) for aging aircraft may reduce the cur- rent inspection burden, and thus decrease costs and system downtime. This thesis developed a generic systems engineering process to describe the system definition for an ISHMS installed on a non-specific aging aircraft. The system definition developed in this thesis followed the Vee Model for systems development and serves as a starting point for future research and/or development efforts in this field. User analysis, user requirements, system requirements, and some Department of Defense Architecture Framework system architectures formed the basis for the generic systems engineering process presented. Furthermore, mathematical simulations compared the failure rate and number of inspections for a scenario without an ISHMS to a scenario with an ISHMS. This simplified analysis demonstrated that a structural health monitoring system for aging aircraft may have promising benefits with respect to both safety improvements and decreased maintenance costs.