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With the world aircraft fleets growing exponentially, the maintenance burden on airlines is also becoming overwhelming. One way to counter this is by making systems “smarter” so that they can self-diagnose themselves, help with troubleshooting, and estimate remaining useful life. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is the engineering discipline that forms the basis for developing such smart systems. In this course, the basic tenets of PHM will be taught with an emphasis on the practical application of PHM to aerospace systems.

The paper presents a theoretical framework for the detection and first-level preliminary identification of potential defects on aero-structure components while employing ultrasonic guided wave based structural health monitoring strategies, systems and tools. In particular, we focus our study on ground inspection using laser-Doppler scan of surface velocity field, which can also be partly reconstructed or monitored using point sensors and actuators on-board structurally integrated. Using direct wave field data, we first question the detectability of potential defects of unknown location, size, and detailed features. Defects could be manufacturing defects or variations, which may be acceptable from design and qualification standpoint; however, those may cause significant background signal artifacts in differentiating structure progressive damage or sudden failure like impact-induced damage and fracture.