A miniaturized composite impact monitor and its evaluation research

From the Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) standpoint, the main purpose of the structural health monitoring is to help the maintenance of aircraft structures. Here, aiming at on-line applications, this paper puts forward a new digital impact localization method. Different from traditional processing methods, the new one is achieved in a digital way by turning the outputs of PZT sensors directly into digital queues and localizing the impact occurring area based on the digital queues obtained. Depending on this method, a PZT sensor array based impact monitor with advantages of miniaturized size, low weight and low energy consumption is developed which can meet the strict on-line application requests. Details of the new impact monitor design are presented in this paper. Meanwhile, a series of experiments, including evaluations on complex composite structures, have been conducted to verify the performance of the new digital impact monitor. This new monitor shows its potential for on-line structural PHM applications on aerospace vehicles.