Large civil aircraft structures underlie strict design requirements such as damage tolerance to ensure safety during flight operation. When it comes to the joining of components of such structures, there is still not much confidence in the process of adhesive bonding. Thus, rivets and bolts are commonly used, despite the advent of more diverse material combinations used and the inherent weight penalty of above-mentioned conventional joining techniques in the aviation industry. To overcome the issues of classical structural bonding, the adhesive joint between metal and fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) can be supported by additively manufactured metallic pins which protrude into the composite material, resulting in so-called pinned hybrid joints. These pins enhance the joint's strength and damage tolerance compared to classical adhesive bonding while being more lightweight than mechanical fastening. However, numerous uncertainties from scattering material properties to sensible manufacturing processes remain. Structural health monitoring (SHM) of pinned hybrid joints may reduce these uncertainties significantly and guarantee the joint's integrity. The present work proposes a new multi-method SHM concept for pinned hybrid joints that applies piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) and electric contacting of the structure itself for sensing and a partly shared cable network. Thereby enabling various active and passive methods at low cabling effort. Possible methods and their features concerning sensing capability, self-diagnosis, evaluation reliability, installation location, and additional electrical contacting of the monitored structure are discussed with respect to their combined application potential and challenges.
Artificially introduced cracks in necked double shear lugs are monitored using piezoelectric transducers attached to the lug shaft and analyzed by the electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) method with a model-based approach. Numerical simulations with coupled-field finite element (FE) models are used to study the frequency response behavior of necked lugs. Through-cracks with lengths up to 3 mm are located at 90° to the lug axis, which is a critical spot for damage initiation. The shift of a selected resonance frequencies found by analytical and numerical calculations are used to estimate the crack length. Results of numerical FE simulations are validated with multiple experimental measurements .
As standard method for structural health monitoring (SHM) the electro-mechanical impedance method evaluates the frequency response of a piezoelectric transducer, which is attached to a mechanical structure of interest. The piezoelectric element is excited by a harmonic voltage signal, which causes typically harmonic oscillations on both element and structure. The measured impedance of the piezoelectric element reflects thus the structural response. Consequently, changes of the impedance indicate structural changes, i.e., damage. This contribution investigates linear and possibly non-linear vibrations provoked by contact acoustic non-linearity of a sub-surface crack, a damage typical for composite delamination, in a harmonically excited structure. The considered structure is an aluminum beam with a sub-surface crack, which is introduced artificially according to a specific manufacturing process developed at the authors research group and already presented at SPIE 2018. Numerical studies presented at IWSHM 2017 and SPIE 2018 showed that the considered damage causes non-linear response to harmonic excitation. The proposed work continuous this research by experimental measurements of the vibration response of the considered beam with sub-surface crack to harmonic excitation by a piezoelectric transducer. Laserscanning Vibrometer measurements along the entire beam and in particular at the crack location identify linear and non-linear vibrations, allow its mode shape visualization and to assign the structure as source for nonlinearity. Furthermore, a piezoelectric transducer that simultaneously records the transverse frequency response functions passing through the sub-surface crack shows high potential for vibration-based SHM methods like the electro-mechanical impedance method to assess the non-linear response of this damage type for identification.
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE) is considered a necessity for optimized lightweight structures. Thus several SHM strategies have been suggested for assessing the condition of such structures. The key aspect of any SHM method is the choice of the damage sensing feature. Ideally the damage sensing feature should be sensitive to small levels of damage, insensitive to measurements noise and ambient condition changes, like loading conditions, temperature, moisture etc. For beam structures the Neutral Axis (NA) is known as a very informative damage sensing feature. The NA position depends on the condition of the structure alone and it is insensitive to the load level. Through the use of advanced data processing tools like the Kalman Filter (KF), the NA estimation can be made robust in the presence of measurement noise and changing ambient conditions. In this paper, the use of a KF based NA estimation technique is investigated for determining the size of a damage. The methodology is employed in experiments on a thin-walled beam with rectangular cross-section under 4-point bending. Cracks of different lengths are introduced in the beam and based on the strain measurements the NA is estimated. The estimated position of the NA is then correlated with the size of the damage.
The electro-mechanical impedance method is a standard SHM approach. The method evaluates the dynamic frequency response of a structure to harmonic excitation. Both excitation and measurement are done by a piezoelectric element. This contribution presents a manufacturing process to generate sub-surface cracks in metallic beams with an opening small enough to create non-linear response to harmonic excitation. The generated simple beam with sub-surface crack is analyzed by means of vibration measurements by a piezoelectric element and a Laser-Scanning-Vibrometer, linear and non-linear FE analysis and microscopic images. Challenges in the measurement of non-linear response signals are revealed and needed further enhancement of the manufacturing process is presented. The non-linear dynamic response signal calculated by the non-linear FE analysis is presented and discussed regarding the detection and parameter identification of sub-surface cracks typical for composite delamination or sandwich debonding by the electro-mechanical impedance method.
Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is recently demonstrated to be viable for damage localization over a spatial area. The algorithm reconstructs the spatial conductivity distribution within a defined boundary via boundary voltage measurements. To solve this inverse problem, a finite element model (FEM) conforming to the interrogated geometry is required. Previous studies on identifying a center crack’s propagation suggests that an FEM-updating strategy may help identify both the existence of a crack and the plastic zones formed around the crack’s tips. In this paper a data-driven algorithm is applied to automatically update the FEM. The selforganizing map algorithm is adopted to categorize the reconstructed conductivity data, tracing the boundary of the crack to be updated as material-absence. The EIT results from the updated FEM model are able to identify damage location and damage severity with desired accuracy.
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