ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an imaging method for locating the impact using metal core piezoelectric fiber (MPF) rosettes. The structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted more and more interest in the engineering community. Its applications cover a broad bandwidth from civil engineering to aerospace applications, especially in aircraft industry. In an active SHM, the delay-and-sum algorithm and tomography method are usually used to create a digital image to highlight the area of the damage. Single MPF is very weak and brittle, which leads a tedious process in bonding the MPF to the structure. The MPF rosette is made up of three MPFs, which have strong directivity in sensing the Lamb waves. Compared with common piezoelectric ceramics with in-plane isotropic characteristic, MPF exhibits unique directivity in Lamb wave sensing, which can locate the direction of the incoming wave without any information about the time of flight or the speed of propagation.