Low-velocity impact source localization in a composite sandwich structure using a broadband piezoelectric sensor network

An online structural health monitoring strategy for real-time impact source localisation in composite sandwich structure (CSS) is presented in this paper. A broadband piezoelectric (PZT) sensor-network based laboratory experiments and finite element method based numerical simulations of low-velocity steel-ball drop impacts at different locations on a CSS have been carried out. It is observed that the arrival-time of the impact-induced elastic wave signals increases with the increase in source-to-sensor distance. Further, the influence of impactor drop-height variations is studied by conducting a series of numerical simulations in ABAQUS. An arrival-time difference calculation based impact source localisation strategy is proposed to locate the impact regions in the CSS. The proposed monitoring strategy uses the registered impact signals (time-domain) at the PZTs to predict impact locations in real-time. Eventually, a study on the estimation of localisation error has been carried out to check the effectiveness of the proposed SHM strategy.