Continuous debonding monitoring of a patch repaired helicopter stabilizer: Damage assessment and analysis

The present work focuses on the structural health monitoring of an aluminium vertical helicopter stabiliser with a pre-introduced crack which was repaired with an adhesively bonded composite patch. The structure was monitored under bending fatigue and its performance was evaluated with Lamb waves, lock-in thermography and ultrasonic testing. Outlier analysis of Lamb waves captured the onset and progress of the damage in the form of patch debonding, enabling the identification of five damage-severity regions. Principal component analysis showed distinctive clusters that corresponded to different damage levels while the application of principal curves on the selected features proved to be an additional damage detection index. Amplitude and phase lock-in images accurately captured the onset and evolution of the damage in the form of patch debonding and honeycomb/skin debonding in agreement with the damage indices obtained from Lamb waves. C-scan further validated the damage mechanisms that were captured by the other methods.