Guided wave structural health monitoring with an array of novel piezoelectric transducers

Abstract

Multi-element, conformable piezoelectric strip transducers have been designed and fabricated for structural health monitoring using ultrasonic guided waves. The piezoelectric fiber composite elements function as a strip transducer to activate a planar wave. A mockup of a storage tank or pressure vessel has been constructed from a steel shell and a hexagonal array of strip transducers. A hot spot to which artificial damage has been induced is monitored with the strip transducers. In addition, conventional piezoelectric disks have also been affixed to the shell in a circular pattern for the purpose of comparison. Different operating conditions are represented by the presence of water inside the shell and temperature variations between 20 and 35°C. The strip transducers have been designed to excite the S1 Lamb wave mode at the dilatational wave speed, which is oblivious to the presence of liquid loaded boundary conditions. An artificial defect simulated a surface breaking fatigue crack. Preliminary results are presented for baseline and damaged conditions using transmission and reflection coefficients as a damage-sensitive feature.At the request of the Proceedings Editor, and all authors of the paper, an updated version of this article was published on 8 April 2014. The Corrigendum attached to the corrected article PDF file explains the changes made to the original paper.