Structural health monitoring

About: Structural health monitoring is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11727 publications have been published within this topic receiving 186231 citations.

A New Impedance Measurement System for PZT-Based Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract: Recent research has shown that electromechanical (E/M) impedance-based techniques are an efficient strategy for damage sensing in the context of structural health monitoring (SHM). The basic principle is to excite the lead zirconate titanate (PZT) sensors attached to the structure and to measure the corresponding electrical impedance. A variation in the electrical impedance indicates a variation in the mechanical impedance and, consequently, structural damage. To measure the electrical impedance, most universities and research centers use expensive, bulky, heavy, and high-powered impedance analyzers, which limit new developments and practical applications. To overcome these issues, this paper presents an efficient and inexpensive methodology for electrical impedance measurement. To verify the efficiency and accuracy of the new methodology, practical tests were carried out, and the results were compared with those obtained using a conventional impedance analyzer.

Assessment of Vibration-based Damage Identification Methods Using Displacement and Distributed Strain Measurements

Abstract: Accurate measurement and monitoring of vibration characteristics is critical for proper detection of the location and severity of damage. However, experimentally measured modal properties are inevitably corrupted by measurement noise and errors, which could render most vibration-based structural damage identification algorithms unreliable for civil structural health monitoring (SHM). This article, through computer simulation and experimental investigation of a simply supported beam, comparatively evaluates the performance of these techniques for practical civil SHM by using displacement modes from accelerometers and long-gage distributed strain measurements. Most of all the techniques proved unreliable for damage identification using noisy measurements from accelerometers, while successful with distributed strain measurements. The findings reveal that long-gage distributed strain measurements are much more efficient choice over the traditional measurement techniques for reliable civil SHM. It may therefor...

A time reversal focusing based impact imaging method and its evaluation on complex composite structures

Abstract: The growing use of composite structures in aerospace structures has attracted much interest in structural health monitoring (SHM) for the localization of impact positions due to their poor impact resistance properties. The propagation mechanism and the frequency dispersion features of signals on complex composite structures are more complicated than those on simple composite plates. In this paper, a time reversal focusing based impact imaging method for impact localization of complex composite structures is proposed. A complex Shannon wavelet transform is adopted to extract frequency narrow-band signals of impact response signals of a PZT sensors array at a special time–frequency scale and to measure the phase velocity of the signals. The frequency narrow-band signals are synthesized using software, depending on the time reversal focusing principle, to generate an impact image to estimate the impact position. A demonstration system is built on a composite panel with many bolt holes and stiffeners on an aircraft wing box to validate this method. The validating results show that the method can estimate the position of impact efficiently.