A strain sensing structural health monitoring system for delaminated composite structures

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for composite materials is becoming a primary task due to their extended use in safety critical applications. Different methods, based on the use of piezoelectric transducers as well as of fiber optics, has been successfully proposed to detect and monitor damage in composite structural components with particular attention focused on delamination cracks.In the present paper a Structural Health Monitoring model, based on the use of piezoelectric sensors, already proposed by the authors for isotropic damaged components, is extended to delaminated composite structures. The dynamic behavior of the host damaged structure and the bonded piezoelectric sensors is modeled by means of a boundary element approach based on the Dual Reciprocity BEM. The sensitivity of the piezoelectric sensors has been studied by varying the delamination length characterizing the skin/stiffener debonding phenomenon of composite structures undergoing dynamic loads. © (2013) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.