Traditional aircraft structures use Aluminium stiffened panels for fuselage, wing and tail plane skins. In recent years stiffened skin panels are manufactured from composite materials instead of Aluminium. The use of composite materials has the potential to reduce aircraft weight, and therefore fuel consumption, and also to reduce maintenance and operational costs. Stiffened panels can be made by attaching stiffeners to a thin panel or by producing integrally stiffened panels, reducing costly assembly operations as well as composite machining operations which are costly and polluting. In this way, a composite stiffened panel has been developed as part of the JTI "Eco Design" technology demonstrator A2 with many ecological, technical and economic benefits.

This proposal has two objectives. The first one is to perform a large-scale test to validate the structural performance of the developed eco panel. The second one is to develop and validate an advanced measurement procedure based on distributed strain measurement systems. One of the main issues of the large-scale tests is the strain measurement. Classic methods can only measure the strain in local positions. To obtain a quasi – continuous strain distribution a very dense grid of strain gauges or rosettes is necessary. Strain measurement with a large number of strain gauges and rosettes is a time consuming and expensive task that could be minimized with the use of distributed strain measurement systems.

To fulfil the first objective two eco panels will be tensile and compression tested in a MTS 2.5MN system. Text fixtures will be designed and produced according the interface areas previously defined together with the Topic Manager.

For the second objective, two distributed strain measurement systems will be used: Photogrametry (ARAMIS) and Fibre Optic Sensors (FBG). The developed measurement procedure will be validated with the readings of the classic strain measurement sensors: Strain gauges and rosettes.