Advances in the development of built-in diagnostic system for filament wound composite structures

Monitoring the structural integrity of filament wound composite structures such as solid rocket motor cases and liquid fuel bottles can help prevent catastrophic failures and prolong their service life. An integrated structural health monitoring system has been developed by Acellent as a non-destructive evaluation tool for detecting hidden damage in filament wound composite structures. The system includes a built-in sensor network, supporting diagnostic hardware and data processing/analysis software. A prototype of a filament wound composite bottle with embedded SMART Layers has been fabricated successfully at NASA Marshall Space and Flight Center. This demonstrated the compatibility of the SMART Layer to filament winding process. Impact tests were performed on the prototype bottle to generate damage. A scan of the entire bottle by the distributed network of sensors using Acellent’s diagnostic system was able to locate the damage. The built-in signal processing and imaging techniques employed by the software demonstrated the ability of the software to display the impact damage with relative ease in the face of temperature change.