Structural health & fatigue monitoring

We provide airworthiness advice to the UK MOD and other commercial customers on the safe operation of their fixed and rotary wing aircraft.

Fatigue Monitoring: interpretation and analysis of fatigue issues for qualification tests and for in-service aircraft. For future fatigue monitoring this is enabled by artificial neural networks to monitor fatigue damage at key locations.

Corrosion control: practical advice across a wide range of metal production routes, welding and joining procedures, corrosion protection concepts. Environmental test chambers capable of performing a range of accelerated corrosion tests including salt-fog, alternate immersion-emersion, stress corrosion cracking and sulphur dioxide testing.

Forensic Engineering: the analysis of structural and component failure investigations covering a diverse range of problems from the identification of materials to specialist support to major crash investigations. In addition to expertise in the failure of traditional metallic components, QinetiQ’s continuing materials research allows state of the art knowledge to be applied to the newest generation of materials including polymers, polymer-composites, adhesives, sealants, ceramics and metal matrix composites.

Teardown: assessment of signs of fatigue damage and environmental degradation through the detailed inspection of retired aircraft. Structural teardowns enable full analysis of ageing platforms which have identified locations susceptible to fatigue and corrosion, allowing inspection regimes to be defined and so take out the cost of ownership.

Operational Loads Measurement (OLM): state–of-the–art in-house computing facilities can be tailored to specific programme needs and used to replay and analyse OLM data taken from transducers measuring aircraft dynamic response.