Indian Scientists Developed Technology to Reduce Aircraft Maintenance Cost

Technology By NAL And CSIR Allows Aircraft To Be Tested While Still Airborne
Peerzada Abrar BANGALORE

TWO of the country's top scientific and avionics research centres have successfully tested a technology that can reduce the cost of running and maintaining an aircraft by nearly a third.
The technology, called structural health monitoring (SHM), developed by the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has the ability to predict cracks or damages on an aircraft even when it is airborne.
"We successfully tested this technology, which is probably the first flight trial of an SHM system on an unmanned aerial vehicle," said Dr A R Upadhya, director of NAL.
The flight trials on Aeronautical Development Establishment's (ADE's) Unmanned Air Vehicle, Nishant, was conducted jointly by CSIR-NAL, ADE, which is a DRDO laboratory, and the Israeli Ministry of Defence at an airfield in Karnataka. The trial followed an eight-year-long development period. At present, airplanes are required to return to the hangar, after a certain number of flights, for numerous evaluation tests that require the removal of every part of the aircraft. Typically, this requires an aircraft to be grounded for nearly a fortnight.
According to experts such as Dr B Dattaguru, former professor at department of aerospace engineering, IISc, aviation majors such as Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and Embraer are already working on this technology. "But I think India has made a breakthrough at a global level," he said.
Aviation experts say the new health monitoring system that allows aircrafts to be tested while still airborne or within a day of being parked in the hangar can sharply reduce maintenance costs. "The health monitoring system can save close to 30% of the maintenance cost running into millions of dollars," said Dr S Gopalakrishnan, professor at the department of aerospace engineering, Indian Institute of Science, who has also developed an aircraft health monitoring technology.
In collaboration with the US-based Georgia Tech University, he has built a sensor technology that tests parked aircraft within a hangar.
"The aircraft goes to the hangar without being dissembled. The laser vibrometer scans the aircraft in 20 minutes and collects data and based on data we predict the damages," said Dr Gopalakrishnan.
The CSIR-NAL invention offers more opportunity to reduce aircraft downtime, as it uses thin, flexible, transparent fibres embedded in the plane, to detect existing or possible future damage even as the aircraft is airborne.
Boeing, the world's largest plane maker, is also working on developing a similar technology, which involves installing sensors on the air frame to be used on the Boeing 787.
"It has become increasingly important to increase the safety and reduce the maintenance costs of aircraft structures, without unnecessarily grounding them," says NAL's Upadhya who believes there is a huge potential for the commercialisation of this innovation in the aviation market.
The sensor test devised by IISc's Gopalakrishnan has been successfully tested on fighter jets in the USA. The US Airforce Office of Scientific Research and Office of Naval Research are now collaborating with IISc on this project. It was the lack of access to special materials used in aircraft and the difficulty in performing tests on Indian fighter jets that made Gopalakrishnan approach foreign universities.
NAL said that health monitoring will play a critical role in India's ambitious civil aviation program (RTA-70), which is aimed at building planes for carrying 70-90 passengers. The design and development of the prototype is estimated to cost about Rs 5,000 crore and is expected to be ready by 2015-16 for flight trials.
The defence market has already shown interest in commercialising structural health monitoring systems for rotorcrafts and unmanned aerial vehicles. Scientists see great potential for use of the health monitoring system in programmes, such as Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), medium combat aircraft, UAVs and fifthgeneration fighter aircraft being developed by Russia and India.
"Such techniques are going to be extensively used in the future in order to cut down the operation costs of the aircraft and can also lead to reduction in airfares. They can prevent ensuing danger of the flights by prewarning the occurrence of failure," said a DRDO scientist, who did not wish to be named.
The breakthrough also has potential to help avert disasters of the type that led to the break up in 2003 of the American space shuttle Columbia when it was re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The disaster was caused by damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system, killing seven crew members, including astronaut of Indian origin Kalpana Chawla.
"The on-line as well off-line health monitoring will not only play a critical role for the aviation industry, but it will also benefit the common man. Some potential applications include wireless health monitoring of human beings as well as large structures such as bridges," says Upadhya of NAL.