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.
Next-generation lightweight-designed structures shall be able to perform self-state assessment via integrated health monitoring systems. In this article a carbon nanotube-embedded polymeric thin film is applied via inkjet-printing to perform spatial strain sensing in conjunction with using electrical impedance tomography. To gain an advanced understanding of the thin film’s spatial strain sensitivity, the elastoresistivity matrix, a fourth-order tensor correlating the strain state of a conductor into its normalized change in resistivity state, is characterized. The Montgomery method is adopted to derive the planar resistivity coefficients of the thin film, and a digital image correlation system is used to measure the planar strains. A validation test suggests that the calculated determinant of the correlated change in anisotropic resistivity shows a fairly similar result to the measured isotropic EIT reconstruction results.
The present article addresses the evaluation of the electro-mechanical (E/M) impedance method as a Structure Health Monitoring (SHM) method to detect and classify damage, more specific, the debonding of a face layer.In the study the considered structure is simplified as a circular sandwich panel of constant thickness, consisting of isotropic face layers and a honeycomb core.The debonding is assumed to be circular and situated at the center of the panel, only variable in its radius.The article starts with a brief introduction to the basic idea of SHM and the fundamentals of the E/M impedance method.Further, the idealized setting is investigated by two sets of experiments whose results are analyzed by typically used damage metrics and by considering both analytical and numerical models.A coupled-field FEM model is developed and compared to the experimental results.Furthermore, an analytical model is derived to evaluate the experimental and numerical results.All results are presented and discussed extensively on pursuing the objective to detect and classify the size of a debonding.Finally, it is shown how a model based approach can predict the presence but also the size of a debonding in the considered sandwich panels based on the E/M impedance measurements.
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