This article presents a coupled electro-mechanical analysis of piezoelectric ceramic (PZT) actuators integrated in mechanical systems to determine the actuator power consumption and energy transfer in the electro-mechanical systems. For a material system with integrated PZT actua tors, the power consumed by the PZT actuators consists of two parts: the energy used to drive the system, which is dissipated in terms of heat as a result of the structural damping, and energy dissi pated by the PZT actuators themselves because of their dielectric loss and internal damping. The coupled analysis presented herein uses a simple model, a PZT actuator-driven one-degree-of- freedom spring-mass-damper system, to illustrate the methodology used to determine the actuator power consumption and energy flow in the coupled electro-mechanical systems. This method can be applied to more complicated mechanical structures or systems, such as a fluid-loaded shell for active structural acoustic control. The determination of the actuator power consumption can be very im portant in the design and application of intelligent material systems and structures and of particular relevance to designs that must be optimized to reduce mass and energy consumption.

This paper presents a frequency domain impedance-signature-based technique for health monitoring of an assembled truss structure. Unlike conventional modal analysis approaches, the technique uses piezoceramic (PZT) elements as integrated sensor-actuators for acquisition of signature pattern of the truss. The concept of the localization of sensing/actuation area for damage detection of an assembled structure is presented for the first time. Through a PZT patch bonded to a truss node and the measurement of its electric admittance, which is coupled with the mechanical impedance of the truss, the signature pattern of a truss is monitored. The admittance of a truss in question is compared with that of the original healthy truss. Statistic algorithm is then applied to extract a damage index of the truss based on the signature pattern difference. Experimental proof that over a selected band, the detection range of a bonded PZT sensor on a truss is highly constrained to its immediate neighborhood is presented. This characteristic allows accurate determination of the damage location in a complex real-world structure with a minimum mathematical modeling and numerical computation.

The Gaussian process is an indispensable tool for spatial data analysts. The onset of the “big data” era, however, has lead to the traditional Gaussian process being computationally infeasible for modern spatial data. As such, various alternatives to the full Gaussian process that are more amenable to handling big spatial data have been proposed. These modern methods often exploit low-rank structures and/or multi-core and multi-threaded computing environments to facilitate computation. This study provides, first, an introductory overview of several methods for analyzing large spatial data. Second, this study describes the results of a predictive competition among the described methods as implemented by different groups with strong expertise in the methodology. Specifically, each research group was provided with two training datasets (one simulated and one observed) along with a set of prediction locations. Each group then wrote their own implementation of their method to produce predictions at the given location and each was subsequently run on a common computing environment. The methods were then compared in terms of various predictive diagnostics. Supplementary materials regarding implementation details of the methods and code are available for this article online. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary materials for this article are available at 10.1007/s13253-018-00348-w.

This article presents a coupled electromechanical analysis of piezoelectric ceramic (PZT) actuators integrated in mechanical systems to determine the actuator power consumption and energy transfer in the electromechanical systems. For a material system with integrated PZT actuators, the power consumed by the PZT actuators consists of two parts: the energy used to drive the system, which is dissipated in terms of heat as a result of the structural damping, and energy dissipated by the PZT actuators themselves because of their dielectric loss and internal damping. The coupled analysis presented herein uses a simple model, a PZT actuator-driven one-degree-of-freedom spring-mass-damper system, to illustrate the methodology used to determine the actuator power consumption and energy flow in the coupled electromechanical systems. This method can be applied to more complicated mechanical structures or systems, such as a fluid-loaded shell for active structural acoustic control. The determination of the actuator power consumption can be very important in the design and application of intelligent material systems and structures and of particular relevance to designs that must be optimized to reduce mass and energy consumption.

Described in this paper are the details of an automated real-time structure health monitoring system. The system is based on structural signature pattern recognition. It uses an array ofpiezoceramic (PZ1) patches bonded to the structure as integrated sensor-actuators, an electric impedance analyzer for structural frequency response function (FRF) acquisition and a PC for control and graphic display. An assembled 3-bay truss structure is employed as a test bed. Two issues, the localization of sensing area and the sensor temperature drift, which are Critical for the sneess of this technique are addressed and a novel approach of providing temperature compensation using probability correlation function is presentecL Due to the negligible weight and size of the solid-state sensor array and its ability to sense incipient-type damage, the system can eventually be implemented on many types of structures such as aircraft, spacecraft, large-span dome roof and steel bridges requiring multilocation and real-time health monitoring