This chapter discusses new approaches to sense and acquire vibration data and to pre-process these data on aeroelastic certification test flights. These new approaches aim to reduce the time to identify the aeroelastic phenomenon and to reduce the size of hardware that must be boarded in the aircraft, thus minimising the risks and costs of the vibration tests. The presented experiments construct a way to develop a non -contact measurement system for flight vibration tests in the aircraft certification process. These experiments have shown that the techniques used today for in-flight trials will be obsolete in the near future, as the aeronautical structures are becoming lighter every day, thus not admitting any additional mass for instrumentation in-flight trials.

Chapter Contents:

• 12.1 Introduction
• 12.1.1 Case study: aeroelastic instability flutter phenomenon
• 12.2 Related work
• 12.2.1 Structural health monitoring
• 12.2.2 Computer vision for structural health
• 12.2.3 Flutter certification
• 12.2.4 Computer vision and in in-flight measurements: future trends
• 12.3 Signal processing on flutter certification
• 12.4 Experiments and results
• 12.4.1 Synthetic data
• 12.4.1.1 Model of the typical wing section
• 12.4.1.2 Pre-processing
• 12.4.1.3 Extraction of dynamic characteristics
• 12.4.1.4 Results for synthetic data
• 12.4.2 Wind tunnel experiment
• 12.4.2.1 Experiment description
• 12.4.2.2 Results for experimental data
• 12.5 Discussion
• 12.5.1 Computer vision
• 12.6 Final remarks
• References

Inspec keywords: aircraft testing; aerospace computing; data acquisition; computerised monitoring; condition monitoring; elasticity; sensors; vibration measurement; computer vision; dynamic testing

Other keywords: vibration data acquisition; UAV structural health monitoring; vibration data sensing; aeronautical structures; flight vibration testing; aircraft; computer vision; aircraft certification process; aeroelastic certification test flight phenomenon

Subjects: Optical, image and video signal processing; Computerised instrumentation; Data acquisition systems; Mechanical variables measurement; Measurement of mechanical variables; Data acquisition equipment and techniques; Aerospace testing and simulation; Computer vision and image processing techniques; Computerised instrumentation; Sensing devices and transducers; Aerospace engineering computing; Sensing and detecting devices