Structural Health Monitoring for Carbon Fiber Resin Composite Car Body Structures

Abstract

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is an emerging field of research in the area of lightweight design. The introduction of expensive carbon fiber resin plastic materials in the automotive industry may in the future justify the application of a monitoring of the load bearing structure via sensors to save weight and costs. Reasons for this additionally lie in the brittle and complex failure behavior of carbon fiber materials. The authors in this paper aim to give an introduction into the principle of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), basics of fatigue of fiber resin composite materials as well as the possible application of these principles for the automotive industry. In addition to this an SHM concept and further results of the experimental research work since October 2011 are depicted. The investigations and experiments leading to this paper have been supported by Honda R&D Europe (Deutschland) GmbH with a research grant.