Impact Damage Identification of Composite Structures with Built-in Piezoelectric Sensor/Actuator Networks

Abstract

An investigation was performed to develop a self-diagnostic technique using a built-in piezoelectric wafer network to detect damage and to identify the extent of the damage in fiber-reinforced composite plates resulting from foreign-object impact. The principle of the technique was to use built-in piezoelectric wafers as actuators to generate stress waves and also use the neighboring piezoelectric wafers as sensors to receive the propagating waves. The difference in sensor measurements before and after the introduction or impact damage, referred to as scatter, contains information about the location and size of site impact damage. Accordingly, the proposed technique. consists of signal generation, signal processing, and damage identification. In the first part of the study, focus was on thin to moderately thick composites where identifying damage in the thickness direction was ignored and only a single piezoelectric wafer network through the composite plates was used. Diagnostic signals were selected for built-in piezoelectric actuators to generate appropriate Lamb waves to enhance the sensitivity of the sensor measurement to damage and to minimize signal noises due to environments. A signal-processing scheme composed of a smooth filtering and a joint time-frequency analysis was utilized to overcome noise interference and convert sensor measurements into sensor and scatter spectrograms in the time-frequency domain.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA412408

Entities

People

  • Calvin S. Wang
  • Fu-Kuo Chang
  • J. H. Park

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aging (Materials)
  • Algorithms
  • Composite Materials
  • Damage Detection
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Fiber Reinforced Composites
  • Frequency
  • Laminates
  • Material Degradation Processes
  • Materials
  • Materials Laboratories
  • Materials Testing
  • Sensor Networks
  • Signal Generators
  • Structural Health Monitoring
  • Three Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Radar Systems Engineering.
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Structural Dynamics.