Structural-Damage Detection by Distributed Piezoelectric Transducers and Tuned Electric Circuits

Local Area Damage Detection in Composite Structures Using Piezoelectric Transducers

An integrated and automated smart structures approach for structural health monitoring applications is presented. This approach, called Active Damage Interrogation (ADI), utilizes an array of piezoelectric transducers attached to or embedded within the structure for both actuation and sensing. The ADI system actively interrogates the structure via broadband excitation of multiple actuators acro...

Tuned Lamb Wave Excitation and Detection with Piezoelectric Wafer Active Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring

The capability of embedded piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) to excite and detect tuned Lamb waves for structural health monitoring is explored. First, a brief review of Lamb waves theory is presented. Second, the PWAS operating principles and their structural coupling through a thin adhesive layer are analyzed. Then, a model of the Lamb waves tuning mechanism with PWAS transducers is d...

Application of Piezoelectric Transducers in Structural Health Monitoring Techniques

Multiactuator Piezoelectric System for Structural Damage Localization

In initial studies, it has been shown that the combination of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the contribution plots of Q and T-statistics can be considered an efficient technique to detect, distinguish and localize damages in structures that are equipped with several piezoelectric transducers (PZT’s). In those previous works, the specimen (aircraft turbine blade) was excited using just ...

Signal Processing Techniques for Damage Detection with Piezoelectric Wafer Active Sensors and Embedded Ultrasonic Structural Radar

Embedded ultrasonic structural radar (EUSR) algorithm is developed for using piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS) array to detect defects within a large area of a thin-plate specimen. Signal processing techniques are used to extract the time of flight of the wave packages, and thereby to determine the location of the defects with the EUSR algorithm. In our research, the transient tone-burst...