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Capability of scheduled maintenance to detect electromagnetic and lightning protection degradation
(2022)
Due to the growing use of low-conductivity composite materials for airframes and skin, the shielding effectiveness of aircraft has been weakened within recent years. As a result, the importance of electromagnetic hazards and associated effects on flight safety have increased dramatically. Especially high intensity electromagnetic fields are likely to interfere with sensitive avionic systems, while lightning strikes produce high-energetic charges and currents which might cause physical damages and induced transients on onboard wirings and equipment-internal circuits. To ensure safe flight and landing conditions, additional protection measures are required to be introduced in aircraft design. However, aging and degradation effects of mentioned electromagnetic and lightning protection features can't be avoided, thus, specific scheduled maintenance actions within appropriate intervals must be defined during certification process to retain every single aircraft in a serviceable condition. As there's a lack of database to validate expected preliminary degradation and aging behavior until the first scheduled inspection, most maintenance definitions just rely on in-service and maintenance experience of similar aicraft.
Hence, within this thesis, current regulations and practical implementations of lightning and electromagnetic protection on Airbus rotorcraft shall be investigated in order to perform 3D simulations for determination of the correlation of electromagnetic protection failure and wiring-induced transients. As a final aim, maintenance improvements for minimization of adverse degradation impact on helicopter safety can be achieved.