Fatigue Life Assessment of Structures Using Electro-Mechanical Impedance Technique

Abstract

This paper describes a new experimental approach for fatigue life assessment of structures based on the equivalent stiffness determined by surface bonded piezo-impedance transducers through the electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) technique. The remaining life of the component (in terms of the cycles of loading that can be sustained) is non-dimensionally correlated with the equivalent identified stiffness. The proposed approach circumvents the determination of the absolute stiffness of the joint and employs the admittance signature of the surface-bonded piezo-transducers directly. The second part of the paper briefly describes the recent advances made in the field of impedance based structural health monitoring (SHM) in terms of low-cost hardware system and improved damage diagnosis through the integration of global dynamic and EMI techniques using the same set of piezo-sensors. Other recent applications such as bio-sensors and traffic sensors pioneered at the Smart Structures and Dynamics Laboratory (SSDL) are also briefly covered.