Structural Integrity Prognosis System Can Predict Failures

Northrop Grumman Corporation announced Tuesday it was awarded the contract to continue development of its Structural Integrity Prognosis System (SIPS) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The $17.8 million contract is a two-year follow-on to the original two-year, $14.2 million effort awarded to Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector. The company's Advanced Capabilities Development team in Bethpage, NY is developing SIPS. 

By applying newly developed sensor systems, analytical models of how metals begin to fail at the microstructural level and advanced reasoning methodologies, the team designed a system that can predict when a wing, for example, will begin to develop cracks.

"The potential benefits from SIPS are huge," said Joseph Garone, director of advanced capabilities development for Northrop Grumman. "Just imagine that you can anticipate major structural failures in an aircraft or other structure before they happen. Or, that you can schedule maintenance according to the usage and stresses imposed on an aircraft, instead of at fixed intervals, which would save operators significant amounts of money and ensure greater availability of aircraft."

A system like SIPS could be a dramatic boon to aero-safety, allowing operators to determine if their older aircraft are safe to fly. Several dramatic incidents over the years have shown the consequences of metal fatigue going unchecked -- from the loss of the upper forward fuselage segment aboard an Aloha Airlines 737 in 1988, to the videotaped final moments of a C-130A air tanker in 2002 (above) and, most recently, the loss of a Chalks Ocean Airways amphib in Florida last December (below, right).

"DARPA's goal is to develop a system that will give military commanders quantitative performance predictions for every piece of equipment, so they can operate each combat system to the limit of its capability," Garone said.

This award follows a successful demonstration last August, where SIPS delivered real-time predictions of the eventual outcome of live fatigue tests of EA-6B Prowler aircraft structural components.The Advanced Capabilities Development team is also running full-scale fatigue tests with SIPS on a retired EA-6B outer wing panel at the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) base in Patuxent River, MD and a retired A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthog" fuselage at the Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems facility in El Segundo, CA. They have also successfully evaluated SIPS' ability to detect cracks in the rotating components of an H-60 helicopter gearbox, also at NAVAIR in Patuxent River.

FMI: www.northropgrumman.com