Section: New Results

Instability monitoring of aeronautical structures

Instability monitoring for LPTV systems

Participants : Laurent Mevel, Ahmed Jhinaoui.

Most subspace-based methods enabling instability monitoring are restricted to the linear time-invariant (LTI) systems. In this paper, a new subspace method of instability monitoring is proposed for the linear periodically time-varying (LPTV) case. For some LPTV systems, the system transition matrices may depend on some parameter and are also periodic in time. A certain range of values for the parameter leads to an unstable transition matrix. Early warning should be given when the system gets close to that region, taking into account the time variation of the system. Using the theory of Floquet, some symptom parameter of stability- or residual- is defined. Then, the parameter variation is tracked by performing a set of parallel cumulative sum (CUSUM) tests. Finally, the method is tested on a simulated model of a helicopter with hinged blades, for monitoring the ground resonance phenomenon [21] . It follows the work on linear systems for aircraft monitoring done previously [14] .

Optimal input design for identification and detection

Participant : Laurent Mevel.

This paper considers the problem of auxiliary input design for subspace-based fault detection methods. In several real applications, particularly in the damage detection of mechanical structures and vibrating systems, environment noise is the only input to the system. In some applications, white noise produces low quality output data for the subspace-based fault detection method. In those methods, a residual is calculated to detect the fault based on the output information. However, some modes of the system may not influence the outputs and the residual appropriately if the input is not exciting enough for those modes. In this paper, the method of "rotated inputs" is implemented to excite the system modes. In addition to produce a residual more sensitive to the weak modes, it is possible to detect system order changes due to the fault using the rotated inputs. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of injecting the auxiliary input to improve the subspace-based fault detection methodology. [13] . This work is funded by FP7-NMP Large Scale Integrated Project IRIS.