Structural Health Monitoring System for Remote Inspection of Material Failure

Abstract

A new structural health monitoring (SHM) system is proposed for inspecting the failure characteristics of engineering materials, which are monitored remotely. This system is controlled using electrical devices with wireless networking system. A PZT ceramic transducer, an accelerometer and a strain gauge are used to understand the failure characteristics. These sensors are attached to the test sample and reveal its static and dynamic strain behaviour, i.e., information on the material failure (crack generation) and related strains. It is also designed that a dummy plate with a PZT material is attached to the test sample. The dummy plate is designed to fracture earlier than the test sample during the loading process, whereupon the SHM system is triggered via the piezoelectric effect. A compact prototype SHM system is created to evaluate the effectiveness of our system. The failure characteristics are monitored well using the prototype SHM system, which might be able to predict the lifetime of the test sample, i.e., the SHM system reveals the critical strain value and crack growth rate just before the final failure of the test samples.