Upscaling Sensing Materials With Challenges of Sensors Embedding in Powder Based Materials and Polymers

This paper has explored and analyzed new routes to design new concepts of materials capable of feeling external effects and feed information back to a monitor and/or react through embedded actuators to resist any deformation. The material with its new artificial sensing property can be easily scaled-up to govern a whole structure at macro scale. The research has investigated a variety of manufacturing routes to build prototypes to be tested for the sake of characterization and performance assessment as well as cost analysis to assess effectiveness. This has included ultrasonic fiber optics embedding in thin Metals e.g. Aluminum which has shown some challenges to be discussed. The host materials included mainly layered manufacturing based materials e.g. powder based materials (Alloy Al6061) and additive process e.g. 3D printing with ABS material. This work has considered samples with concepts having embedded fiber optics in 1D, 2D and 3D. The integrity of the fiber optics and the host materials as well as the sensors performance has been investigated under several conditions of pressure, temperature and geometric placement of the fiber optics. A parametric compromise between materials standard performance and integrity of the sensors is to be found.