Patent ID: 8600611

Claim:
A system for measuring fatigue of an aircraft component subjected to mechanical stresses, the system comprising: a plurality of stress sensors C i mounted on the aircraft component in which i=1 to n where n is a number of sensors, each sensor being configured to detect a predetermined mechanical stress threshold S(C i ) and to deliver a data signal representative of violation of this threshold; means for recording the data signal; and means for calculating damage based on the data signal, wherein the sensors are configured to detect different thresholds of a same stress, which thresholds are staged so as to compute, based on a number of threshold violation occurrences of each sensor n(C n ), an estimate of fatigue of the aircraft component due to the predetermined mechanical stress, wherein each sensor C i measures a number of occurrences N(C i ) of stress higher than the stress threshold S(C i ), and the number of threshold violation occurrences n(C n ) between the stress threshold of the sensor S(C i ) and a higher stress threshold S(C i+1 ) is computed as n(C n )=N(C n ); for i<n, n(C i )=N(C i )−N(C i+1 ), wherein for each sensor C i , an equivalent damage D i for the aircraft component corresponding to a range of stresses between the stress threshold S(C i ) of the sensor C i and the higher threshold S(C i+1 ) is computed, and the estimate of fatigue of the aircraft component is calculated based on a sum of the equivalent damage D i for each sensor C i .