Structural Health Monitoring at TWI
The ability to carry out structural health monitoring (SHM) on a whole structure provides a robust, continuous monitoring process resulting in improved safety levels and operational reliability, which can lead to reduced inspection and maintenance costs.
TWI has world class expertise in structural health monitoring (SHM) derived from our long history of undertaking cutting edge research into structural failures. Four factors determine the way a structure fails under load: imposed stresses, defects in the material, the immediate environment, and susceptibility of the material's microstructure. These factors produce fatigue and corrosion in metallic members which eventually lead to brittle or ductile fracture.
A current area of study is acoustic emission (AE) techniques as applied to structural health monitoring. AE testing is a non-destructive testing (NDT) technique that detects and monitors the release of ultrasonic stress waves from localised sources when a material deforms under stress. TWI has a range of AE hardware that has been applied for both in service and lab-based examination in varying applications across sectors including nuclear, aerospace and marine.
TWI’s uses vibration analysis as a structural health monitoring technique to detect structural damage. It gives operators vital data to inform their maintenance strategy – providing a link between vibration analysis of and the likelihood of the occurrence of fatigue crack initiation.
Applications
Structural monitoring solutions are used for a wide range of critical assets across industry. SHM projects require a strategic combination of sensors, data acquisition systems, and analytical software to continuously assess structural integrity.
The asset integrity management of a monitored structure reduces the risk of failure and unexpected downtimes, as well as allowing operators to make informed decisions about the long term asset management of their structures.
TWI has been involved in, and continues to work on, a large and wide ranging number of projects related to the development of SHM systems. These are designed to focus on a range of monitoring systems for different structural types including surface transportation systems using composite materials, wind turbines, aircraft structures, tidal stream power generation systems, storage tanks and civil engineering structures such as bridges.
For more information on our structural monitoring services, please email contactus@twi.co.uk.