Structural Integrity Prognosis System Can Predict Failures
Northrop Grumman
Corporation announced Tuesday it was awarded the contract to
continue development of its Structural Integrity Prognosis System
(SIPS) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA).
The $17.8 million contract is a two-year follow-on to the
original two-year, $14.2 million effort awarded to Northrop
Grumman's Integrated Systems sector. The company's Advanced
Capabilities Development team in Bethpage, NY is developing
SIPS.
By applying newly developed sensor systems, analytical models of
how metals begin to fail at the microstructural level and advanced
reasoning methodologies, the team designed a system that can
predict when a wing, for example, will begin to develop cracks.
"The potential benefits from SIPS are huge," said Joseph Garone,
director of advanced capabilities development for Northrop Grumman.
"Just imagine that you can anticipate major structural failures in
an aircraft or other structure before they happen. Or, that you can
schedule maintenance according to the usage and stresses imposed on
an aircraft, instead of at fixed intervals, which would save
operators significant amounts of money and ensure greater
availability of aircraft."
A system like SIPS could be a dramatic boon to aero-safety,
allowing operators to determine if their older aircraft are safe to
fly. Several dramatic incidents over the years have shown the
consequences of metal fatigue going unchecked -- from the loss of
the upper forward fuselage segment aboard an Aloha Airlines 737 in
1988, to the videotaped final moments of a C-130A air tanker in
2002 (above) and, most recently, the loss of a Chalks Ocean Airways
amphib in Florida last December (below, right).
"DARPA's goal is to
develop a system that will give military commanders quantitative
performance predictions for every piece of equipment, so they can
operate each combat system to the limit of its capability," Garone
said.
This award follows a successful demonstration last August, where
SIPS delivered real-time predictions of the eventual outcome of
live fatigue tests of EA-6B Prowler aircraft structural
components.The Advanced Capabilities Development team is also
running full-scale fatigue tests with SIPS on a retired EA-6B outer
wing panel at the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) base in
Patuxent River, MD and a retired A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthog"
fuselage at the Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems facility in El
Segundo, CA. They have also successfully evaluated SIPS' ability to
detect cracks in the rotating components of an H-60 helicopter
gearbox, also at NAVAIR in Patuxent River.