Nonlinear piezoelectric impedance modulation and its application to crack detection

摘要

In this paper, a structural health monitoring (SHM) methodology that can detect and characterize local structural damages in early stage is developed, by merging the concepts of two existing SHM principles, a piezoelectric impedance-based methodology and a nonlinear wave modulation spectroscopy. The presented SHM system mainly consists of a piezoelectric element bonded on the structural surface, a high-frequency harmonic voltage source, and a current detector. When the structure is subjected to a dynamic load at low-frequencies, it vibrates, and the scattering conditions for the high-frequency elastic waves in the vicinity of the inherent damages will change in synchronization with the structural vibration. This nonlinear effects of vibro-acoustic interaction between the low-frequency vibration and the high-frequency wave field causes the change in the driving-point impedance at the high frequency range, which can significantly modulate the coupled electro-mechanical impedance (or admittance) of the piezoelectric element. Therefore, if the piezoelectric element is driven by a fixed amplitude high-frequency harmonic voltage source, the nonlinear modulation of the coupled admittance can be observed as the amplitude and phase modulation of the current flowing through the piezoelectric element. A simplified modeling study of the above-mentioned nonlinear piezoelectric impedance modulation successfully leads to a damage evaluation index that assesses the intensity of the modulation of the modal stiffness. Experiments using a cracked beam are conducted to see how the impedance modulation can be observed and to examine the performance of the proposed method.