Structural Health Monitoring by Piezo-Impedance Transducers. I: Modeling

The electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique, which employs piezoelectric–ceramic lead–zirconate–titarate (PZT) patches as impedance transducers, has emerged as a powerful nondestructive evaluation technique during the last few years. This series of two papers present a new simplified methodology to diagnose structural damages by means of surface bonded piezo-impedance transducers. The first part introduces a new PZT–structure electroelastic interaction model based on the concept of “effective impedance.” The proposed formulations can be conveniently employed to extract the mechanical impedance of any “unknown” structural system from the admittance signatures of a surface bonded PZT patch. This is an improvement over the existing models, whose complexity prohibits direct application in similar practical scenarios. This also eliminates the requirement of any a priori information concerning the phenomenological nature of the structure. The proposed model is experimentally verified by means of test on a smart system comprising an aluminum block with a PZT patch instrumented on it. Part II of this paper outlines a new methodology to evaluate structural damages using the extracted impedance spectra. The proposed approach is found to be suitable for diagnosing damages in structures ranging from miniature precision machine and aerospace components to large civil structures.