Indian scientists develop technology to reduce aircraft maintenance cost

[Ranga_The_Donga]

BANGALORE: Two of the country’s top scientific and avionics research centres have successfully tested a technology that can reduce the cost of running and maintaining an aircraft by nearly a third.

The technology, called structural health monitoring (SHM), developed by the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has the ability to predict cracks or damages on an aircraft even when it is airborne.

“We successfully tested this technology , which is probably the first flight trial of an SHM system on an unmanned aerial vehicle,” said Dr A R Upadhya, director of NAL.

The flight trials on Aeronautical Development Establishment’s (ADE’s ) Unmanned Air Vehicle, Nishant, was conducted jointly by CSIR-NAL, ADE, which is a DRDO laboratory, and the Israeli Ministry of Defence at an airfield in Karnataka.

The trial followed an eight-year-long development period. At present, airplanes are required to return to the hangar, after a certain number of flights, for numerous evaluation tests that require the removal of every part of the aircraft. Typically , this requires an aircraft to be grounded for nearly a fortnight.

According to experts such as Dr B Dattaguru , former professor at department of aerospace engineering, IISc, aviation majors such as Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and Embraer are already working on this technology. “But I think India has made a breakthrough at a global level,” he said.

[CheGuevara]

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