Current inspection, maintenance and lifetime estimation practices for composite cylinders have been adopted from earlier NASA research. WavesinSolids LLC are proposing a technological based on an acoustic emission (AE) technique for the in-service testing of composite cylinders. The approach will establish the correlation between AE activity and intensity metrics and the stress intensity factor, and utilize this to determine the damage growth rate in composite cylinders. The proposed research will develop lifetime prediction models that incorporate multiple damage modes as well as data from NDE of composite cylinders to perfect the models. The appropriate sensor technologies for assessing composite cylinder damage assessment will be identified. The proposed inservice testing technology will be implemented on a low-cost, compact instrumentation platform capable of embedded intelligence. The feasibility of the proposed method as a cost-effective, implementationally viable and capable of providing the required regulatory and corporate output for fitness-for-service and other maintenance decisionmaking will be demonstrated.
