Review Article on Condition Assessment of Structures Using Electro-Mechanical Impedance Technique

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a process for determination of presence, location, severity of damages and remaining life of the infrastructures. SHM is widely applied in aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering systems to assess the conditions of structures to improve the operation, safety, serviceability and reliability, respectively. There are various SHM techniques for monitoring the health of structures such as global response based and local techniques. Damages occur in the structures due to its inability to withstand intended design loadings, physical environment and chemical environment. Therefore, damage identification is necessary to improve the durability of the structures for protection against catastrophic failure. The research paper is focused on electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) technique which is one of the techniques based on smart materials. The smart materials are utilized for monitoring the health of the structures. These are used for damage determination and its quantification for the interrogated structures. Variation in admittance or impedance signature shows the existence of damage in the structures. Furthermore, the different statistical methods viz., root mean square deviation (RMSD), mean absolute percentage deviation (MAPD), covariance (Cov), and correlation coefficient (CC) are used for the quantification of damage. Smart material such as piezoelectric materials, its properties and applications are also considered. In this paper, the implementation of EMI technique based on different recent advances in smart materials and their appropriateness have been described. Subsequently, the reviewed investigations are significant for the monitoring of real-life infrastructures. The presented paper is the compact state-of-the-art for EMI technique which is used for SHM. This examination will be valuable to infrastructural health monitoring and engineering applications in respect to innovative research directions.