51314-3970-Evaluation of Environmental Exposure and Corrosive Conditions within Rotorcraft Airframes

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Product Number: 51314-3970-SG

ISBN: 3970 2014 CP

Author: Jeff Demo

Publication Date: 2014

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Damage caused by environmental exposure is a major contributor to the costs of corrosion and greatly reduced readiness of aircraft. A leading cost driver in aircraft corrosion is the inspection time required to evaluate an airframe for contaminant exposure and corrosion detection. Traditionally corrosion inspections are only able to identify damage that has occurred in readily accessible areas while damage or corrosion precursors in occluded or difficult to access locations can go undetected and untreated for years ultimately compounding the structural damage and resulting in more extensive repairs or component replacement procedures. Through the instrumentation within a Navy operated UH-1N environmental ingress and corrosion activity can be monitored without the need for teardowns and manual inspections. The instrumentation of multiple locations within the airframe focused on previously identified areas of environmental ingress or corrosion “hotspots” can allow data to be recorded and analyzed for the determination of actual exposure to water high humidity contaminants and temperature variations. This paper will provide analysis of the data collected over a period of several months in deployment categorizing the environmental severity at each of the instrumented locations. The benefits of the installed sensor systems will be discussed including their potential use as a maintenance scheduling tool and as an aircraft corrosion usage tracking system. Continuing work on the system will include analysis optimizations size/weight reductions and assessing value added and potential for fleet-wide integration.