A low-power Bluetooth-based wireless sensor network and its global confliction-solving impact localization method

Abstract

During the whole service lifetime of aircraft structures with composite materials, impacts are inevitable and can usually cause severe but barely visible damages. Since the occurrences of impact are random and unpredictable, it is a hotspot direction to develop an online impact monitoring system that can meet strict limitations of aerospace applications including small size, light weight, and low power consumption. Piezoelectric (PZT) sensor, being able to generate impact response signals with no external power and cover a large-scale structure with only a small amount of them, is a promising choice. Meanwhile, for real systems, networks with multiple nodes are normally required to monitor large-scale structures in a global way to identify any impact localization confliction, yet the existing studies are mostly evaluated with single nodes instead of networks. Therefore, in this paper, based on a new low-power node designed, a Bluetooth-based digital impact monitoring PZT sensor network is proposed for the first time with its global confliction-solving impact localization method. Evaluations of the system as a network are researched and analyzed on a complex real aircraft wing box for a global confliction-solving impact localization, showing a satisfying high accuracy.