A Novel Individual Aircraft Life Monitoring Method Based on Reliable Life Consumption Assessment

Individual life monitoring is crucial for ensuring aircraft flight safety. Conventional life-consumption-based monitoring methods ignore reliability, thus disjoining them from the aircraft’s reliable life determination and extension, where high confidence and reliability are required. Therefore, this paper proposes a reliable life consumption and individual life monitoring method for aircraft structure fatigue. In the paper, the P-S-N curve, i.e., the relationship between the aircraft structure’s life (N) and fatigue load (S) under a certain probability (P), is established, by which the lower confidence limit of the aircraft structure’s reliable life can be evaluated under any fatigue loads. Based on that and the aircraft’s monitored fatigue loads, the indexes of reliable life consumption and remaining reliable life percentages are proposed and assessed in real time for individual aircraft life monitoring and online life management. Case studies indicate that the proposed method can guarantee high confidence and reliability requirements in individual life monitoring, consistent with the aircraft’s life determination and extension, which are widely accepted nowadays in engineering practice.