Multimodal structural health monitoring based on active and passive sensing

We present a structural health monitoring system based on the simultaneous use of passive and active sensing. The passive approach is based on acoustic emission, whereas the active approach uses the electromechanical impedance and the guided ultrasonic wave methods. As all these methods can be deployed with the use of wafer-type piezoelectric transducers bonded or embedded to the structure of interest, this article describes a unified structural health monitoring system where acoustic emission, electromechanical impedance, and guided ultrasonic wave are integrated in the same hardware/software unit. We assess the feasibility of this multimodal monitoring in a large flat aluminum plate instrumented with six transducers. Acoustic emission events are simulated by exciting a tone burst or by using the conventional pencil lead break test, and the detected signals are processed with a source localization algorithm to identify the position of the source. For the active sensing, damage is simulated by adding a small mass to the plate: the raw waveforms are processed with a delay-and-sum algorithm to create an image of the plate, whereas the electrical admittance of each transducer is analyzed using the statistical index of the root-mean-square deviation. The results presented in this article show that the proposed system is robust, mitigates the weaknesses of each method considered individually, and can be developed further to address the challenges associated with the structural health monitoring of complex structures.