The most commonly encountered type of damage in aircraft composite structures is caused by lowvelocity impacts due to foreign objects such as hail stones, tool drops and bird strikes. Often these events can cause severe internal material damage that is difficult to detect and may lead to a significant reduction of the structure's strength and fatigue life. For this reason there is an urgent need to develop structural health monitoring systems able to localise low-velocity impacts in both metallic and composite components as they occur. This article proposes a novel monitoring system for impact localisation in aluminium and composite structures, which is able to determine the impact location in real-time without a-priori knowledge of the mechanical properties of the material. This method relies on an optimal configuration of receiving sensors, which allows linearization of well-known nonlinear systems of equations for the estimation of the impact location. The proposed algorithm is based on the time of arrival identification of the elastic waves generated by the impact source using the Akaike Information Criterion. The proposed approach was demonstrated successfully on both isotropic and orthotropic materials by using a network of closely spaced surface-bonded piezoelectric transducers. The results obtained show the validity of the proposed algorithm, since the impact sources were detected with a high level of accuracy. The proposed impact detection system overcomes current limitations of other methods and can be retrofitted easily on existing aerospace structures allowing timely detection of an impact event.
Reciprocal time reversal (inverse filtering) of acousto-ultrasonic fields is a very efficient technique to focus elastic waves through reverberant isotropic and anisotropic media. Such a methodology relies on the correlation of the experimental Green's function that is acquired by a set of receiver sensors from a limited number of impact sources. However, although heterogeneities and discontinuities within the structural response can be compensated by the inverse filtering process, environmental effects such as temperature variations as well as incoherent noise measurements and the finite number of excitation sources may degrade the quality of time reversal focusing. The scope of this article was to study the factors affecting the impact location imaging using the reciprocal time reversal method in the presence of complex diffuse wave fields. Particularly, a signal-stretch strategy was developed to compensate the temperature changes before remitting the back-propagated wave field at the focus point. Then, in order to investigate the imaging performance and the sensitivity of the proposed methodology, different sets of libraries with reduced input signals were created and tested. Finally, different configurations of the receiver piezoelectric sensors were used to perform the reciprocal time reversal method. To validate this research work, two geometrically complex composite structures, that is, a composite tail rotor blade and a stiffened composite panel, were used. Results showed that both the temperature compensation and the signal processing with the reduced time traced signals and receiver sensors allowed obtaining an accurate identification of the impact events.
Nonlinear ultrasonic techniques rely on the measurement of nonlinear elastic effects caused by the interaction of ultrasonic waves with the material damage, and have shown high sensitivity to detect micro-cracks and defects in the early stages. This paper presents a nonlinear ultrasonic technique, here named nonlinear elastic multi-path reciprocal method, for the identification and localisation of micro-damage in composite laminates. In the proposed methodology, a sparse array of surface bonded ultrasonic transducers is used to measure the second harmonic elastic response associated with the material flaw. A reciprocal relationship of nonlinear elastic parameters evaluated from multiple transmitter-receiver pairs is then applied to locate the micro-damage. Experimental results on a damaged composite panel revealed that an accurate damage localisation was obtained using the normalised second order nonlinear parameter with a high signal-to-noise-ratio (∼11.2dB), whilst the use of bicoherence coefficient provided high localisation accuracy with a lower signal-to-noise-ratio (∼1.8dB). The maximum error between the calculated and the real damage location was nearly 13mm. Unlike traditional linear ultrasonic techniques, the proposed nonlinear elastic multi-path reciprocal method allows detecting material damage on composite materials without a priori knowledge of the ultrasonic wave velocity nor a baseline with the undamaged component.
In recent years, the growing interest of aerospace companies in wireless structural health monitoring systems has led to the research of new energy efficient sources and power harvesting solutions. Among available environmental power sources, temperature gradients originated at different locations of the aircraft can be used by thermo-electric generators (TEGs) to create electrical voltage. TEGs are lightweight, provide high-energy conversion and do not contain movable parts. Thermal diffusion systems, commonly known as heatsinks, can be combined with TEGs to enhance their performance by increasing heat dissipation from a high temperature surface to the ambient air. This paper focused on the enhancement of TEG performance by developing an air-cooled heatsink for low-power wireless structural health monitoring applications. The design, manufacturing and testing of the proposed thermal diffusion system was investigated by evaluating the increase of the temperature gradient between the opposite surfaces of a commercial TEG element. The thermal performance of the heatsink was assessed with numerical finite element thermal simulations and validated with experimental tests. Experimental results revealed that the proposed thermal diffusion system provided higher temperature differences and, therefore, higher output power in comparison with traditional cylindrical pin-fin heatsinks. A hybrid heat diffusion system composed by copper heatsinks and highly oriented pyrolytic graphite layers was also here proposed in order to allow TEG reaching wireless SHM operative power requirements of tens of mW and, at the same time, adapt the assembly to the complexity of aerospace SHM arrangements. Experimental results revealed that the proposed heatsink-TEG arrangement was able to generate an output power over 25 mW.
This paper presents a damage detection and localization technique based on nonlinear elastic waves propagation in a damage composite laminate. The proposed method relies on the time of arrival estimation of the second harmonic nonlinear response obtained with second order phase symmetry analysis filtering and burst excitation. The Akaike Information Criterion approach was used to estimate the arrival times measured by six receiver transducers. Then, a combination of Newton's method and unconstrained optimization was employed to solve a system of nonlinear equations in order to obtain the material damage coordinates. To validate this methodology, experimental tests were carried out on a damaged composite plate. The results showed that the technique allows calculating the damage position with high accuracy (maximum error ~5 mm).
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