MOSCOW, February 9. /TASS/. Russia’s Advanced Research Fund has started developing an advanced system of aircraft structures' control based on the principles of the work of living organisms’ nervous system, the Fund’s press office told TASS on Thursday.
"As part of the Advanced Research Fund’s project, work is under way to develop a system designed for its integration into the composite material to exercise non-destructive control of the condition of aircraft structures. The researchers who developed the future technology concept, made parallels with the living organism’s nervous system, pursuant to which optical fibers sensitive to mechanical impacts and united into a network will be embedded into the composite material’s structure," the press office said.
In turn, Project Head Dmitry Uspensky told TASS that information on the aircraft structure’s condition will be transmitted online by a laser beam that will spread inside the optical fiber embedded in the aircraft’s design.
"The unique possibilities of the embedded aircraft structure’s non-destructive control system, which the Fund is developing, will help both assess the airliner’s current condition in real time and predict the remaining service life of the aircraft’s composite parts, which will increase the safety of modern aircraft flights significantly," he said.
Despite the outstanding technical and economic characteristics of aircraft made of composite materials, they cannot be safely operated on a regular basis without onboard structure integrity control systems, he said.
The ability of optical fibers’ sensitive elements to sense inconsiderable motions of the aircraft’s structures in the air and on the ground will considerably increase the safety of flights of such planes. This will help promptly detect emerging defects in the aircraft structures and assess their nature.
Most similar systems that exist today operate on the basis of electronic sensors built into certain aircraft mechanisms and devices rather than on the basis of fiber optic technologies.