Low crosstalk switch unit for dense piezoelectric sensor networks

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM), on the basis of piezoelectric (PZT) sensors and lamb wave method, is efficient in estimating the state of monitored structures. Furthermore, to monitor large-scale structures, dense piezoelectric sensor networks are required, which usually contain many piezoelectric sensor pairs called actuator-sensor channels. In that case, considering the few data acquisition channels especially in the data acquisition board with a high sampling rate and limited quantity of signal amplifiers used in an integrated computer system, a switch unit is adopted to switch to different channels. Because of the high frequency and power of the lamb wave excitation signal, there exists a crosstalk signal in the switch unit. A large crosstalk signal is mixed into the response signal so that the on/off-line signal processing task is difficult to achieve. This paper first analyzes the crosstalk signal phenomenon, describes its production mechanism, and proposes a method to reduce it. Then a 24-switch channel low crosstalk switch unit based on a digital I/O board PCI7248 produced by Adlink technology is developed. An experiment is implemented to validate it. Its low crosstalk characteristics make it promote the real application of the SHM based active lamb wave method. Finally, a general software program based on LabVIEW software platform is developed to control this switch unit.