Tag Archives: aerospace

Most valued player performs remote installation

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Our Most Valued Player (inset) installing a point sensor in the front section of a fuselage at Airbus in Toulouse under the remote direction of engineers in Switzerland and the UKMany research programmes have been derailed by the pandemic which has closed research laboratories or restricted groups of researchers from working together to solve complex problems. Some research teams have used their problem-solving skills to find new ways of collaborating and to continue to make progress. In the DIMES project we have developed an innovative system for detecting and monitoring the propagation of damage in aircraft structures, and prior to the pandemic, we were planning to demonstrate it on a full-scale test of an aircraft fuselage section at Airbus in Toulouse. However, the closure of our laboratories and travel restrictions across Europe have made it impossible for members of our team based in Liverpool, Chesterfield, Ulm and Zurich to meet or travel to Toulouse to set-up the demonstration. Instead we have used hours of screen-time in meetings to complete our design work and plan the installation of the system in Toulouse. These meetings often involve holding components up to our laptop cameras to show one another what we are doing.  The components of the system were manufactured in various locations before being shipped to Empa in Zurich where they were assembled and the complete system was then shipped to Toulouse.  At the same time, we designed a communication system that included a headset with camera, microphone and earpieces so that our colleague in Toulouse could be guided through the installation of our system by engineers in Germany, Switzerland and the UK.  Amazingly, it all worked and we were half-way through the installation last month when a rise in the COVID infection rate caused a shutdown of the Airbus site in Toulouse.  What we need now is remote-controlled robot to complete the installation for us regardless of COVID restrictions; however, I suspect the project budget cannot afford a robot sufficiently sophisticated to replace our Most Valued Player (MVP) in Toulouse.

The University of Liverpool is the coordinator of the DIMES project and the other partners are Empa, Dantec Dynamics GmbH and Strain Solutions Ltd.

Logos of Clean Sky 2 and EUThe DIMES project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820951.  The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Image: Our Most Valued Player (inset) installing a point sensor in the front section of a fuselage at Airbus in Toulouse under the remote direction of engineers in Switzerland and the UK.

Slow start to an exciting new project on thermoacoustic response of AM metals

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We held the kick-off meeting for a new research project this week.  It’s a three-way collaboration involving three professors based in Portugal, the UK and USA [Chris Sutcliffe, John Lambros at UIUC and me]; so, our kick-off meeting should have involved at least two of us travelling to the laboratory of the third collaborator and spending some time brainstorming about the challenges that we have agreed to tackle over the next three years.  Instead we had a call via Skype and a rather procedural meeting in which we covered all of the issues without really engendering any excitement or sparking any new ideas.  It would appear that we need the stimulus of new environments to maximise our creativity and that we use body language as well as facial expressions to help us reach a friendly consensus on which  crazy ideas are worth pursuing and which should be quietly forgotten.

Our new research project has a long title: ‘Thermoacoustic response of Additively Manufactured metals: A multi-scale study from grain to component scales‘.  In simple terms, we are going to look at whether residual stresses could be designed to be beneficial to the performance of structural parts used in demanding environments such as those found in reusable spacecraft, hypersonic flight vehicles and breeder blankets in fusion reactors.  Residual stresses are often induced during the manufacture of parts and are usually detrimental to the performance of the part.  Our hypothesis is that in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, we have sufficient control of the manufacture of the part that we can introduce ‘designer stresses’ which will improve the part’s performance in demanding environments.  The research is funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK and is supported by The MTC and Renishaw plc; you can find out more at Grants on the Web. The research will be building on our recent research on ‘Potential dynamic buckling in hypersonic vehicle skin‘ [posted July 1st, 2020] and earlier work, see ‘Hot stuff‘ on September 13th, 2012.  While the demanding environment is not new to us, we will be using 3D printed parts for the first time instead of components made by conventional (subtractive) machining and taking them to higher temperatures.

The thumbnail shows measured modal shapes for a subtractively-manufactured plate subject to the three temperature regimes: room temperature (left), transverse heating of the centre of the plate (middle) and longitudinal heating on one edge (right) from Silva, A.S., Sebastian, C.M., Lambros, J. and Patterson, E.A., 2019. High temperature modal analysis of a non-uniformly heated rectangular plate: Experiments and simulations. J. Sound & Vibration, 443, pp.397-410.

 

Potential dynamic buckling in hypersonic vehicle skin

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The skin of an aircraft is supported on the inside by a network, or mesh, of ribs and stringers running approximately at right angles to one another; so that the skin is effectively a series of rectangular plates supported around their edges.   In hypersonic flight, above five times the speed of sound, these rectangular plates are subject to vibration and to high temperatures that vary spatially and with time.  The combined vibratory and thermal loading causes the plates to buckle out of plane which has two possible detrimental consequences: first, it causes the formation of fatigue cracks leading to catastrophic failure; and, second, it might influence the formation of the boundary layer in the flow over the skin of the aircraft and affect the aerodynamics of the aircraft.  In my laboratory, we have built a test-rig that allows us to subject rectangular plates to random mechanical vibrations up to 1000Hz and, at the same time, to temperature distributions upto 1000K that vary in time and space.  Earlier this year, we published an article in which we showed, by experiment, that an edge-reinforced rectangular plate behaved as a dynamic system in response to thermal loading.  In other words, when a constant temperature distribution is applied, the shape of the plate varies with time until an equilibrium state is achieved.  In addition, we found that the post-buckled shape of the plate is not proportional to the energy supplied but dependent on the in-plane temperature distribution.  Probably, both of these observed behaviours are a result of differential thermal expansion of the plate and its reinforcements.

The image shows point-wise temperature and displacement measurements (centre) at the centre and edge of a reinforced plate (top) subject to a localised strip of heating over time as shown by the temperature distributions (bottom).

This is the fourth in a series of posts on recent work published by my research group.  The others are: ‘Salt increases nanoparticle diffusion‘ on April 22nd, 2020; ‘Spatio-temporal damage maps for composite materials‘ on May 6th, 2020; and, ‘Thinking out of the box leads to digital image correlation through space‘ on June 24th, 2020.

Source:

Santos Silva AC, Lambros J, Garner DM & Patterson EA, Dynamic response of a thermally stressed plate with reinforced edges, Experimental Mechanics, 60:81-92, 2020.

Thinking out of the box leads to digital image correlation through space

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This is the third in a short series of posts on recent engineering research published by my research group.  Actually, two have already been published: ‘Salt increases nanoparticle diffusion‘ on April 22nd, 2020; and ‘Spatio-temporal damage maps for composite materials‘ on May 6th, 2020 and then I got distracted.  This third one arose from the same project as the time-damage maps which was sponsored by the United States Air Force.  The time-damage maps allow us to explore the evolution of failure in complex materials; however, we already know that damage tends to initiate from imperfections or flaws in the microstructure in the material.  New continuous fibre reinforced composite (CFRC) materials based on ceramics are very sensitive to defects or anomalies in their microstructure, such as misalignment of fibres.  However, they are capable of withstanding temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Centigrade, which offers the opportunity to use them in jet engines or nuclear power plants to help generate energy more efficiently.  Therefore, it is worthwhile investigating effective methods of inspecting their microstructure which we can do either destructively by repetitively polishing away the surface of a sample and viewing it in a microscope, or non-destructively using x-ray tomography.  In both cases, the result is hundreds of ‘images’ containing millions of data values from which it is challenging to extract useful information.  In our work, we have used a little lateral thinking, to show how digital image correlation, usually used to track deformation of structures using multiple images collected over time [see ‘256 shades of grey‘ on January 22nd, 2014] , can be used to track fibres through the multiple images of the layers of the microstructure.  The result is the sort of ‘stick’ diagram in the image showing the orientation of fibres through the sample.  We have demonstrated that our new algorithm was more reliable and 30 times faster than its nearest rival.

The image shows, at the top, a typical stack of images from the microscope of a ceramic matrix composite; and, at the bottom, a plot of 3d profiles of the fibres tracked using the DIC-based method with the fibres orientated nominally at ±45° from the sectioning (x-y) plane shown in red and green colours.

Source:

Amjad K, Christian WJR, Dvurecenska K, Chapman MG, Uchic MD, Przybyla CP & Patterson EA, Computationally efficient method of tracking fibres in composite materials using digital image correlation, Composites Part A, 129:105683, 2020.