From 4th to 8th February 2018, I attended the 17th Annual Workshop on the Holistic Structural Integrity Process (HOLSIP) at Snowbird Lodge, near Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Briefly, HOLSIP says that when you analyse the strength and stiffness of any structure, not just for aircraft, you should consider:
- all failure modes and their interaction
- the physics and chemistry
- the structure’s reliability as a system.
For more about HOLSIP, please see my previous HOLSIP posts or the HOLSIP website.
Attendees included:
- Militaries: the US Air Force and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group
- Researchers: Southwest Research Institute, National Research Council of Canada and universities from the USA and Japan
- Companies: APES, Fatigue Technologies, Rolls Royce, TRI Austin and Caterpillar.
HOLSIP’s smallness is a strength. It promotes strong and constructive discussion. In my presentation, which I called ‘HOLSIP: SMS for your ASIP’, I tried to acquaint the mainly military audience with a civil regulatory development that could encourage more holistic structural integrity analysis: Safety Management Systems (SMS). I was intentionally provocative, to stir discussion. You can download my presentation from ‘Tech’. Other presentations are on the HOLSIP website.
After the Workshop, I was privileged to meet privately with HOLSIP’s founder, Dr Hoeppner, who was not well enough to attend the Workshop. He hopes to publish his first volume on structural integrity in the next year. It will be worth waiting for.