Concurrent structural and material fatigue damage prognosis integrating sensor data

In this paper, a novel method for concurrent structural and material fatigue crack growth analysis integrating sensor data is proposed. The proposed method is based a strain responses reconstruction algorithm for a dynamic system and a time-based fatigue crack growth formulation. The dynamic reconstruction is based on the empirical mode decomposition with intermittency criteria and transformation equations derived from finite element modeling. The structural responses measured from remote locations decomposed into modal responses using empirical mode decomposition. Transformation equations based on finite element modeling are employed to extrapolate the modal responses from the measured locations to critical locations where fatigue damage is likely to occur. The fatigue prognosis problem at the structural and material level is expressed as a set of coupled hirachical state-space functions. Concurrent analysis for a frame strcutrue is demonstrated and discussions are given based on the simulation results.