September 2014 – Innovative Unified Damage Mechanisms-Based Model to Predict Remaining Useful Life for Rotorcraft Structures
Safe, Inc., in partnership with a major research University, has been awarded a Phase I STTR program to demonstrate the feasibility of using the newly developed concept of acoustic information entropy to measure material damage and predict the remaining useful life of commercially available rotorcraft alloys. Efforts to address the response of materials to damage are typically made by deterministic or probabilistic approaches through fracture mechanics (FM) and damage mechanics (DM), where a crack tip is well defined. Random damage, has, however, been largely neglected. The program’s priority will be to establish the process framework and to develop and demonstrate the feasibility of a resultant computer model that can accurately predict remaining useful life in rotorcraft components.