Fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based acoustic emission (AE) detection and monitoring is considered as a potential and emerging technology for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. In this paper, an overview of the FBG-based AE monitoring system is presented, and various technologies and methods used for FBG AE interrogation systems are reviewed and discussed. Various commercial FBG AE sensing systems, SHM applications of FBG AE monitoring, and market potential and recent trends are also discussed.
In the application of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) methods and related technologies, the transducer used for electroacoustic conversion has gradually become a key component of SHM systems because of its unique function of transmitting structural safety information. By comparing and analyzing the health and safety of large-scale structures, the related theories and methods of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) based on ultrasonic guided waves are studied. The key technologies and research status of the interdigital guided wave transducer arrays which used for structural damage detection are introduced. The application fields of interdigital transducers are summarized. The key technical and scientific problems solved by IDT for Structural Damage Monitoring (SHM) are presented. Finally, the development of IDT technology and this research project are summarised.
Most of the existing Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems are vulnerable to environmental and operational damages. The majority of these systems cannot detect the size and location of the damage. Guided wave techniques are widely used to detect damage in structures due to its sensitivity to different changes in the structure. Finding a mathematical model for such system will help to implement a reliable and efficient low-cost SHM system. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed to detect the size and location of damages in physical structures using the piezoelectric sensor. The proposed model combines both pitch-catch and pulse-echo techniques and has been verified throughout simulations using ABAQUS/ Explicit finite element software. For empirical verification, data was collected from an experimental set-up using an Aluminum sheets. Since the experimental data contains a lot of noises, a Butterworth filter was used to clean up the signal. The proposed mathematical model along with the Butterworth filter have been validated throughout real test bed.
Practical ultrasonic structural health monitoring systems must be able to deal with temperature changes and some signal amplitude/phase drift over time; these issues have been investigated extensively with low-frequency-guided wave systems but much less work has been done on bulk wave systems operating in the megahertz frequency range. Temperature and signal drift compensation have been investigated on a thick copper block specimen instrumented with a lead zirconate titanate disc excited at a centre frequency of 2 MHz, both in the laboratory at ambient temperature and in an environmental chamber over multiple 20°C–70°C temperature cycles. It has been shown that the location-specific temperature compensation scheme originally developed for guided wave inspection significantly out-performs the conventional combined optimum baseline selection and baseline signal stretch method. The test setup was deliberately not optimised, and the signal amplitude and phase were shown to drift with time as the system was temperature cycled in the environmental chamber. It was shown that the ratio of successive back wall reflections at a given temperature was much more stable with time than the amplitude of a single reflection and that this ratio can be used to track changes in the reflection coefficient from the back wall with time. It was also shown that the location-specific temperature compensation method can be used to compensate for changes in the back wall reflection ratio with temperature. Clear changes in back wall reflection ratio were produced by the shadow effect of simulated damage in the form of 1-mm diameter flat-bottomed holes, and the signal-to-noise ratio was such that much smaller defects would be detectable.
Fibre Bragg Grating Based Acoustic Emission Measurement System for Structural Health Monitoring Applications
