Integrated Damage Inspection System for Engineering Structure Using an Active Sensing Network: Development and Validation

摘要

An integrated damage inspection system was established for in-service engineering structures. For the long propagation distance and sensitivity to small damages, Lamb waves were adopted to perform real-time quantitative evaluation of structural damage or multi-damage in this system. All the necessary hardware needed to achieve the Lamb waves based technique, such as a coustic-ultrasonic wave generation, signal acquisition, central controlling, were co mprehensively integrated into a PXI bu s based Industrial control computer (IPC). An active sensor network, comprising a number of standa rdized piezoelectric sensing units, was developed to supplement this technique, offering improved flexibility to accomm odate structures of diffe rent geometries, desirable redundancy and enhanced reliability when operated in nois y environment. In addition, modules related to signal processing, damage detection and evaluation, data fusion and results presentation were developed and transferred in a m an-machine interface (MMI) which was established using NI Lab VIEW? software. Id entification results are presented in pixelated images with the assistance of imaging algorithms, facilitating visualization of damage and d epiction of overall structural health status in a quantitative, rapid and automatic manner. The effectiveness of this system was validated experimentally.