A new diagnostic system for damage monitoring of BFRP plates

Abstract

This work studies a new framework for damage detection in composite plate systems made of Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymer (BFRP) through analysis of electrical capacitance sensors (ECS) measurements. First, the plate damage finite element model is established, where one side of the plate is subjected to the fatigue effect of applied pressure, then the electrical potential difference between the electrode pairs (EPD) is measured before and after damage. The distributed ECS measuring electrodes are installed around the Plate and loaded the transient external excitations between each other. The transfer function (TF) of the “open loop” plate system is suggested and applied to reflect damage evolution. The accuracy and reliability of the proposed technique are validated with available experimental results in the literature. Results show that the signal magnitude will suddenly and sensitively change when the damage starts to grow under electrode pairs, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach and promising potential for engineering applications.