scholarly journals Review of Structural Health Monitoring Methods Regarding a Multi-Sensor Approach for Damage Assessment of Metal and Composite Structures

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 826 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kralovec ◽  
Martin Schagerl

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the continuous on-board monitoring of a structure’s condition during operation by integrated systems of sensors. SHM is believed to have the potential to increase the safety of the structure while reducing its deadweight and downtime. Numerous SHM methods exist that allow the observation and assessment of different damages of different kinds of structures. Recently data fusion on different levels has been getting attention for joint damage evaluation by different SHM methods to achieve increased assessment accuracy and reliability. However, little attention is given to the question of which SHM methods are promising to combine. The current article addresses this issue by demonstrating the theoretical capabilities of a number of prominent SHM methods by comparing their fundamental physical models to the actual effects of damage on metal and composite structures. Furthermore, an overview of the state-of-the-art damage assessment concepts for different levels of SHM is given. As a result, dynamic SHM methods using ultrasonic waves and vibrations appear to be very powerful but suffer from their sensitivity to environmental influences. Combining such dynamic methods with static strain-based or conductivity-based methods and with additional sensors for environmental entities might yield a robust multi-sensor SHM approach. For demonstration, a potent system of sensors is defined and a possible joint data evaluation scheme for a multi-sensor SHM approach is presented.

Author(s):  
Bin Lin ◽  
Victor Giurgiutiu

This paper presents the investigation of piezo-optical active sensing methodology for structural health monitoring (SHM). Piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) have emerged as one of the major structural health monitoring (SHM) technology; with the same installation of PWAS transducers, one can apply a variety of damage detection methods; propagating acousto-ultrasonic waves, standing waves (electromechanical impedance) and phased arrays. In recent years, fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) sensors have been investigated as an alternative to piezoelectric sensors for the detection of ultrasonic waves. FBG have the advantage of being durable, lightweight, and easily embeddable into composite structures as well as being immune to electromagnetic interference and optically multiplexed. In this paper, the investigation focused on the interaction of PWAS and FBG sensors with structure, and combining multiple monitoring and interrogation methods (AE, pitch-catch, pulse-echo, phased-array, thickness mode, electromechanical impedance). The innovative piezo-optical active sensing system consists of both active and passive sensing. PWAS and FBG sensors are bonded to the surface of the structure, or are integrated into structure by manufacturing process. The optimum PWAS size and excitation frequency for energy transfer was determined. The FBG sensors parameters (size, spectrum, reflectivity, etc.) for ultrasonic guided waves sensing were also evaluated. We focused on the optimum FBG length and design to improve the sensitivity, coverage, and signal to noise ratio. In this research, we built the fundamental understanding of different sensors with optimum placement. Calibration and performance improvements for the optical interrogation system are also discussed. The paper ends with conclusions and suggestions for further work.


2013 ◽  
Vol 558 ◽  
pp. 364-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart G. Taylor ◽  
Kevin M. Farinholt ◽  
Gyu Hae Park ◽  
Charles R. Farrar ◽  
Michael D. Todd ◽  
...  

This paper presents ongoing work by the authors to implement real-time structural health monitoring (SHM) systems for operational research-scale wind turbine blades. The authors have been investigating and assessing the performance of several techniques for SHM of wind turbine blades using piezoelectric active sensors. Following a series of laboratory vibration and fatigue tests, these techniques are being implemented using embedded systems developed by the authors. These embedded systems are being deployed on operating wind turbine platforms, including a 20-meter rotor diameter turbine, located in Bushland, TX, and a 4.5-meter rotor diameter turbine, located in Los Alamos, NM. The SHM approach includes measurements over multiple frequency ranges, in which diffuse ultrasonic waves are excited and recorded using an active sensing system, and the blades global ambient vibration response is recorded using a passive sensing system. These dual measurement types provide a means of correlating the effect of potential damage to changes in the global structural behavior of the blade. In order to provide a backdrop for the sensors and systems currently installed in the field, recent damage detection results for laboratory-based wind turbine blade experiments are reviewed. Our recent and ongoing experimental platforms for field tests are described, and experimental results from these field tests are presented. LA-UR-12-24691.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136943322110384
Author(s):  
Xingyu Fan ◽  
Jun Li ◽  
Hong Hao

Vibration based structural health monitoring methods are usually dependent on the first several orders of modal information, such as natural frequencies, mode shapes and the related derived features. These information are usually in a low frequency range. These global vibration characteristics may not be sufficiently sensitive to minor structural damage. The alternative non-destructive testing method using piezoelectric transducers, called as electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique, has been developed for more than two decades. Numerous studies on the EMI based structural health monitoring have been carried out based on representing impedance signatures in frequency domain by statistical indicators, which can be used for damage detection. On the other hand, damage quantification and localization remain a great challenge for EMI based methods. Physics-based EMI methods have been developed for quantifying the structural damage, by using the impedance responses and an accurate numerical model. This article provides a comprehensive review of the exciting researches and sorts out these approaches into two categories: data-driven based and physics-based EMI techniques. The merits and limitations of these methods are discussed. In addition, practical issues and research gaps for EMI based structural health monitoring methods are summarized.


Author(s):  
Tuncay Kamas ◽  
Banibrata Poddar ◽  
Bin Lin ◽  
Lingyu Yu ◽  
Victor Giurgiutiu

The thermal effects at elevated temperatures mostly exist for pressure vessel and pipe (PVP) applications. The technologies for diagnosis and prognosis of PVP systems need to take the thermal effect into account and compensate it on sensing and monitoring of PVP structures. One of the extensively employed sensor technologies has been permanently installed piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS) for in-situ continuous structural health monitoring (SHM). Using the transduction of ultrasonic elastic waves into voltage and vice versa, PWAS has been emerged as one of the major SHM sensing technologies. However, the dynamic characteristics of PWAS need to be explored prior its installation for in-situ SHM. Electro-mechanical impedance spectroscopy (EMIS) method has been utilized as a dynamic descriptor of PWAS and as a high frequency local modal sensing technique by applying standing waves to indicate the response of the PWAS resonator by determining the resonance and anti-resonance frequencies. Another SHM technology utilizing PWAS is guided wave propagation (GWP) as a far-field transient sensing technique by transducing the traveling guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) into substrate structure. The paper first presents EMIS method that qualifies and quantifies circular PWAS resonators under traction-free boundary condition and in an ambience with increasing temperature. The piezoelectric material degradation was investigated by introducing the temperature effects on the material parameters that are obtained from experimental observations as well as from related work in literature. GWP technique is also presented by inclusion of the thermal effects on the substrate material. The MATLAB GUI under the name of Wave Form Revealer (WFR) was adapted for prediction of the thermal effects on coupled guided waves and dynamic structural change in the substrate material at elevated temperature. The WFR software allows for the analysis of multimodal guided waves in the structure with affected material parameters in an ambience with elevated temperature.


2007 ◽  
Vol 347 ◽  
pp. 69-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Giurgiutiu

This paper presents the perspective of the Structural Mechanics program of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research on the damage assessment of structures. It is found that damage assessment of structures plays a very important role in assuring the safety and operational readiness of Air Force fleet. The current fleet has many aging aircraft, which poses a considerable challenge for the operators and maintainers. The nondestructive evaluation technology is rather mature and able to detect damage with considerable reliability during the periodic maintenance inspections. The emerging structural health monitoring methodology has great potential, because it will use on-board damage detection sensors and systems, will be able to offer on-demand structural health bulletins. Considerable fundamental and applied research is still needed to enable the development, implementation, and dissemination of structural health monitoring technology.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147592172096512
Author(s):  
Stefano Mariani ◽  
Yuan Liu ◽  
Peter Cawley

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.


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