Temperature and axial stress effects in electromechanical-impedance-method-based structural health monitoring

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted much interest in the last two decades to handle the aging infrastructure systems all over the world. As one of the potential solutions, Electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) method was introduced in the early 1990s for SHM of civil, mechanical and aerospace structures. This paper presents the current investigation at UCSD on the feasibility of using an impedance-based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technique to monitor the Continuous Welded Rail (CWR). The objective of this research is to investigate the temperature and axial loading effect on theoretical models of the Electro-Mechanical Impedance (EMI) technique based on structural dynamics, integrated with experimental studies. Signatures and features from analytical models and experimental results are compared. The final results illustrate that the proposed models would be promising to characterize the temperature and axial stress effects.