Health monitoring to detect pre-fault conditions for integrated electrical power - carbon fibre composite structure systems

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This PhD will develop methods for health monitoring of integrated electrical power and carbon fibre, enabling the early stage detection and location of degradation in these integrated systems, before an electrical fault develops, thus significantly reducing the number of electrical faults during flight. Hence this will enable truly resilient, integrated systems design, reducing flight hours in post-electrical fault conditions and costly, unscheduled time out of service for maintenance. This research directly supports the design and implementation of resilient integrated systems on future aircraft and engines, supporting both electrification and lightweight agendas which are critical enablers for decarbonisation of flight.A particular challenge is the hazardous environment that the aero-electrical power system must operate in, with high levels of vibration, extreme temperature and low atmospheric pressure. These all contribute to system degradation, and ultimately electrical faults. It would be highly advantageous to be able to detect and locate this degradation at an early stage, before an electrical fault can occur. This requires the design and implementation of appropriate heath monitoring approaches, and is a key focus of this PhD. Hence the PhD will open up a new area of research, branching out from ongoing research on fault diagnostics and protection for integrated electrical power and composite structure design, into health monitoring and prognostics for these systems.For the successful development of a health monitoring method for an integrated electrical power and CFRP structural system, the project will first understand the degradation process of the integrated electrical CFRP system from a healthy system to a faulted system. Second, the project will utilise this information on degradation processes and behaviours to identify thresholds for degradation detection and translate these to electrical power system, CFRP layup and integrated systems design decisions.