Data Mining for Structural Health Monitoring

Author(s):  
Ramdev Kanapady ◽  
Aleksandar Lazarevic

Structural health monitoring denotes the ability to collect data about critical engineering structural elements using various sensors and to detect and interpret adverse “changes” in a structure in order to reduce life-cycle costs and improve reliability. The process of implementing and maintaining a structural health monitoring system consists of operational evaluation, data processing, damage detection and life prediction of structures. This process involves the observation of a structure over a period of time using continuous or periodic monitoring of spaced measurements, the extraction of features from these measurements, and the analysis of these features to determine the current state of health of the system. Such health monitoring systems are common for bridge structures and many examples are citied in (Maalej et al., 2002). The phenomenon of damage in structures includes localized softening or cracks in a certain neighborhood of a structural component due to high operational loads, or the presence of flaws due to manufacturing defects. Damage detection component of health monitoring system are useful for non-destructive evaluations that are typically employed in agile manufacturing systems for quality control and structures, such as turbine blades, suspension bridges, skyscrapers, aircraft structures, and various structures deployed in space for which structural integrity is of paramount concern (Figure 1). With the increasing demand for safety and reliability of aerospace, mechanical and civilian structures damage detection techniques become critical to reliable prediction of damage in these structural systems. Most currently used damage detection methods are manual such as tap test, visual or specially localized measurement techniques (Doherty, 1997). These techniques require that the location of the damage have to be on the surface of the structure. In addition, location of the damage has to be known a priori and these locations have to be readily accessible. This makes current maintenance procedure of large structural systems very time consuming and expensive due to its heavy reliance on human labor.

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1524-1541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Marzani ◽  
Nicola Testoni ◽  
Luca De Marchi ◽  
Marco Messina ◽  
Ernesto Monaco ◽  
...  

This article reports on the creation of an open database of piezo-actuated and piezo-received guided wave signals propagating in a composite panel of a full-scale aeronautical structure. The composite panel closes the bottom part of a wingbox that, along with the leading edge, the trailing edge, and the wingtip, forms an outer wing demonstrator approximately 4.5 m long and from 1.2 to 2.3 m wide. To create the database, a structural health monitoring system, composed of a software/hardware central unit capable of controlling a network of 160 piezoelectric transducers secondarily bonded on the composite panel, has been realized. The structural health monitoring system has been designed to (1) perform electromechanical impedance measurement at each transducer, in order to check for their reliability and bonding strength, and (2) to operate an active guided wave screening for damage detection in the composite panel. Electromechanical impedance and guided wave measurements were performed at four different testing stages: before loading, before fatigue, before impacts, and after impacts. The database, freely available at http://shm.ing.unibo.it/ , can thus be used to benchmarking, on real-scale structural data, guided wave algorithms for loading, fatigue, as well as damage detection, characterization, and sizing. As an example, in this work, a delay and sum algorithm is applied on the post-impact data to illustrate how the database can be exploited.


2014 ◽  
Vol 783-786 ◽  
pp. 2296-2301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Jawali ◽  
Prakash Parasivamurthy ◽  
Ashwini Nagesh

Aim of a structural health monitoring system must be to collect sufficient information about the damage for appropriate remedial measures to be taken to ensure safety. The preliminary step in the process of damage assessment is locating the damage .One of the challenges faced by the structural health monitoring system is monitoring in-flight damages. Localization of in-flight damages or sudden impacts can be achieved by monitoring the acoustic emissions in real time mode. In this paper, an approach based on the employment of Piezo-electric transducer rosettes to locate the acoustic emission source in an aluminum plate is presented. Using the strain gage rosette concepts adapted for piezoelectric transducers, the wave strain principal angles are determined. When two rosettes are used, the intersection of the principal wave strain directions detected by the rosettes gives the wave source location. The method does not require the knowledge of wave velocity in the medium in contrast to the time of flight based location. Hence, this technique can be used in anisotropic or complex structures where the source localization using the conventional time of flight method is difficult. The principal strain angle using the voltage response of the transducers and the rosette principles are obtained and the co-ordinates of the wave source location are calculated using the co-ordinates of the centroids of the rosettes in MATLAB.According to the tests, the rosette piezo-transducer outperforms the single piezo elements to a degree justifying its complexity. The rosette piezo transducer provides more damage related information compared to single elements and hence the performance of the damage detection system can be significantly improved if rosettes are used.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1557-1568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Heinlein ◽  
Peter Cawley ◽  
Thomas Vogt

Validation of the performance of guided wave structural health monitoring systems is vital if they are to be widely deployed; testing the damage detection ability of a system by introducing different types of damage at varying locations is very costly and cannot be performed on a system in operation. Estimating the damage detection ability of a system solely by numerical simulations is not possible as complex environmental effects cannot be accounted for. In this study, a methodology was tested and verified that uses finite element simulations to superimpose defect signals onto measurements collected from a defect-free structure. These signals are acquired from the structure of interest under varying environmental and operational conditions for an initial monitoring period. Measurements collected in a previous blind trial of an L-shaped pipe section, onto which a number of corrosion-like defects were introduced, were utilised during this investigation. The growth of three of these defects was replicated using finite element analysis and the simulated reflections were superimposed onto signals collected on the defect-free test pipe. The signal changes and limits of reliable detection predicted from the synthetic defect reflections superimposed on the measurements from the undamaged complex structure agreed well with the changes due to real damage measured on the same structure. This methodology is of great value for any structural health monitoring system as it allows for the minimum detectable defect size to be estimated for specific geometries and damage locations in a quick and efficient manner without the need for multiple test structures while accounting for environmental variations.


Author(s):  
Zeaid Hasan ◽  
Fares Hasweh ◽  
Omar Abu Al-Nadi ◽  
Ghassan Atmeh

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the process of implementing a damage identification strategy which can be utilized in several applications including aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering infrastructure. Damage is defined as changes to the material and/or geometric properties of these systems. These changes adversely affect the current or future performance of the system. In order to identify damage in a suitable and meaningful manner, the damaged state is compared with other usually undamaged states. This study focuses on a structural health monitoring (SHM) system based on detecting shifts in natural frequencies of the structure. This structural health monitoring system incorporates a low power wireless transmitter that sends a warning signal when damage is detected in a structure. The damage detection technique is implemented on composite structures which are widely used in many applications including aeronautical and aerospace. An automated damage detection system capable of providing information of damage locations based on the finite element analysis and able to compare damage events to other historical data is also proposed in this paper and initially implemented using a microcontroller chip. Moreover, a control methodology using piezoelectric fiber composites, such as active fiber composites (AFCs) and microfiber composites (MFCs), is included as part of the system for vibration suppression purposes. The advantages of using piezoelectric fiber composite actuators are their high performance, flexibility, and durability when compared with the traditional piezoceramic (PZT) actuators. The proposed system may be implemented in many structural components such as aircraft frames and bridges. This SHM technology may help replace the current time-based maintenance scheme with a condition-based one. The condition-based maintenance scheme relies on the ability to monitor the condition of the system and supply information of damage detection to allow a corrective action to be taken.


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