A quantitative multidamage monitoring method for large-scale complex composite

Abstract

Modern structures on aircraft make increasing use of large-scale composite structures. Quantitative damage monitoring for composites, including damage occurrence, number, localization, and size estimation, will help reduce maintenance costs, improve fleet management efficiency through condition-based maintenance, and potentially more rapidly enable new material systems and structural concepts by integrating health monitoring into the design itself. With the advantage of easily interpretable, intuitive, and accurate imaging result, the delay-and-sum imaging algorithm is frequently researched and applied to damage monitoring. However, when it is applied to multidamage monitoring in large-scale composites, the consumed time and computation resource are too much for pixel value calculation. Besides, due to the material anisotropy and existence of bolt holes and stiffeners in the researched complex carbon fiber composite laminate, propagation mechanism of Lamb wave is quite complicated, which makes the conventional localization result not accurate by delay-and-sum algorithm according to the point with pixel peak value. What is more, the imaging quality is deteriorated with concurrence of multiple damages, and thus, quantitative damage information cannot be extracted. Hence, the damage index merging algorithm is introduced for quick damage identification and damage merging in every subarea divided by piezoelectric sensor array. The delay-and-sum imaging algorithm is performed afterward only in subareas identified with damages, which significantly improves the efficiency of damage imaging for large-scale composites. The nonlinear normalization of pixel values compensates the deterioration of multidamage imaging quality. Then, a weighted average algorithm is introduced for more accurate localization. A further damage size level estimation is realized with probabilities by extracting the image pixel peak value. Experiments with six damages simultaneously on the complex carbon fiber laminate verify the effectiveness of the proposed quantitative multidamage monitoring algorithm with localization error below 2 cm and correct damage number and size level estimation.

Determining impact induced damage by lamb wave mode extracted by EMD method

“…However, alternate methods can be often be used to determine whether a particular impact event caused damage [13,14]. Damage can often stimulate acoustic emission; the energy (amplitude) of acoustic emission generated from the impact is larger than that generated by damage.…”

“…This failure can be attributed to impact during launch by a piece of heat insulated bushing weighing less than 2 kg. In order to avoid such catastrophic failures in the future, a methodological study aimed at studying impact and damage diagnosis of composite materials has always become a hot topic for health monitoring of structures [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

A model-based approach for statistical assessment of detection and localization performance of guided wave–based imaging techniques

“…damage localization) and TCL 3 (i.e. size estimation) have been performed [8,10,38,27,28,39,40,41,42,29,30,43,44].…”

Self-Diagnosis and Self-Reconfiguration of Piezoelectric Actuator and Sensor Network for Large Structural Health Monitoring

“…Then the monitoring system will self-organize the actuator-sensor path of the PZT transducer network to cover the damage and adopt the damage factor algorithm [13] to evaluate the damage location. To verify the effectiveness of the presented method, the damage is simulated by mass block with 50 g weight loading the structure, and the ones on positions 6, 7, and 11 are considered in Figure 17.…”