Full-scale Modal Testing of a Hawk T1A Aircraft for Benchmarking Vibration-Based Methods

Research developments for structural dynamics in the fields of design, systemidentification and structural health monitoring (SHM) have dramaticallyexpanded the bounds of what can be learned from measured vibration data.However, significant challenges remain in the tasks of identification,prediction and evaluation of full-scale structures. A significant aid in theroadmap to the application of cutting-edge methods to the demands of in-serviceengineering structures, is the development of comprehensive benchmark datasets.With the aim of developing a useful and worthwhile benchmark dataset forstructural dynamics, an extensive testing campaign is presented here. Thisrecent campaign was performed on a decommissioned BAE system Hawk T1A aircraftat the Laboratory for Verification and Validation (LVV) in Sheffield. The aimof this paper is to present the dataset, providing details on the structure,experimental design, and data acquired. The collected data is made freely andopenly available with the intention that it serve as a benchmark dataset forchallenges in full-scale structural dynamics. Here, the details pertaining totwo test phases (frequency and time domain) are presented. So as to ensure thatthe presented dataset is able to function as a benchmark, some baseline-levelresults are additionally presented for the tasks of identification andprediction, using standard approaches. It is envisaged that advancedmethodologies will demonstrate superiority by favourable comparison with theresults presented here. Finally, some dataset-specific challenges aredescribed, with a view to form a hierarchy of tasks and frame discussion overtheir relative difficulty.