2-D Directional Phased Array Using Piezoelectric Paint to Detect Damages in Isotropic Plates

Research interests in structural health monitoring have increased due to in-situ monitoring of structural components to detect damage. This can secure personal safety and reduce maintenance effort for mechanical systems. Conventional damage detection techniques known as nondestructive evaluation (NDE) have been conducted to detect and locate damaged area in structures. Ultrasonic testing, using ultrasonic transducers or electromagnetic acoustic transducers, is one of the most widespread NDE techniques, based on monitoring changes in acoustic impedance. Although the ultrasonic testing has advantages such as high sensitivity to discontinuities and evaluation accuracy, it requires testing surface accessibility, close location to the damaged area, and decent skill and training of technicians. In recent years, modal analysis techniques to capture changes of mode shapes and natural frequency of structures have been investigated. However, the technique is relatively insensitive to small amount of damage such as an initial crack which can rapidly grow in structures under cyclic loadings. In addition, structural health monitoring based on guided waves has become a preferred damage detection approach due to its quick examination of large area and simple inspection mechanisms. There are many techniques used to analyze sensor signals to bring out features related to damage. A phased array coupled with the guided wave approach has been introduced to effectively analyze complicated guided wave signals. Phased array theory as a directional filtering technique is usually used in antenna applications. By using phased array signal processing, virtually steering the array to find the largest response of source, the desired signal component can be enhanced while unwanted information is eliminated.