Control of the Building Parameters of Additively Manufactured Polymer Parts for More Effective Implementation of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Methods

Abstract

Electromechanical impedance (EMI) method is one of the most widely used structural health monitoring (SHM) methods. The low-cost alternative of the method, surface response to excitation (SuRE) method has the similar characteristics. Both methods require additional disks/sensors to estimate the location of defects or external loading. Additive manufacturing (AM) methods have been matured and started to be an alternative to the conventional manufacturing. Most of the parts made by the AM methods are hollow. The infill type and skin thickness are selected to manufacture the parts faster by using less material and to avoid warping of the part. In this paper, manufacture of the parts with two infill types and two surface skin thicknesses at their different locations are proposed to estimate the site of the applied external forces without using additional disks/sensors. SuRE method was used in the study. The experimental results indicated that the frequencies of the most changed spectrum sections were different depending on the infill types and surface skin thicknesses. The same approach could be used for the EMI applications.