Composite Materials with Self-Contained Wireless Sensing Networks

The increasing demand for in-service structural health monitoring, particularly in the aircraft industry, has stimulated efforts to integrate self sensing capabilities into materials and structures. This work presents efforts to develop structural composite materials which include networks of sensors with decision-making capabilities that extend the functionality of the composite materials to be information-aware. Composite panels are outfitted with networks of self-contained wireless sensor modules which can detect damage in composite materials via active nondestructive testing techniques. The wireless sensor modules will communicate with one another and with a central processing unit to convey the sensor data while also maintaining robustness and the ability to self-reconfigure in the event that a module fails. Ultimately, this research seeks to create an idealized network that is compact in size, cost efficient, and optimized for low power consumption while providing a sufficient data transfer rate to a local host.