Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Plates Subjected to Impacts Using the Electromechanical Impedance Technique

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the use of the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technique based on the concept of electromechanical impedance for the assessment of low-energy impact damage in laminated carbon-fiber composite plates. The experiments were carried-out by using an especially designed pendulum, and were planned in such a way to accommodate a range of test conditions, such as impact energy and dimension of the impacting piece. Also, it was investigated the influence of the frequency band in which the impedance functions are measured. Additionally, statistical metamodels were built aiming at establishing functional relations between the values of the damage metric and impact energy for single and multiple impacts. The obtained results demonstrate the capability of the monitoring method to identify various damage levels corresponding to different impact conditions.