Impedance based structural health monitoring using an active piezoelectric sensor

Structural health monitoring is a new technology under development aiming to detect structural integrity damages at their incipient stage. Early detection of structural integrity damage can bring about appropriate repairs and retro reinforcements to prevent the progression of the damage from causing a catastrophic failure of the structure. An impedance-based sensing technique is one of the promising structural health monitoring systems. The impedance-based structural monitoring system uses a collocated piezoelectric actuator/sensor to interrogate the structure under test and measure the resulting impedance response of the sensor. Inspecting the deviations of the resulting impedance spectrum of a damaged condition of the structure from that of the "healthy" condition of the same structure, the structural integrity condition can be assessed. In this thesis, a collocated piezoelectric actuator/sensor was surface bonded on a cantilevered bolt jointed aluminum beam. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...