Impedance-Based Damage Identification Enhancement via Tunable Piezoelectric Circuitry

The piezoelectric impedance-based method for damage detection has been explored extensively for its high sensitivity to small-sized damages with low-cost measurement circuit which enables remote damage monitoring. While the method has good potential, the amount of feasible impedance data is usually much less than the number of required system parameters to accurately identify the damage location/severity via an inverse formulation. This data incompleteness forms a highly underdetermined problem and because of this numerical ill-conditioning, the predicted damage parameters will be significantly influenced by unavoidable measurement noise and the accuracy of the base-line model. In this study, the state of the art of impedance-based damage identification is advanced by incorporating a tunable piezoelectric circuitry with the structure to enrich the impedance measurements. This piezoelectric circuitry introduces additional degrees of freedom to the structure and changes the dynamics of the coupled system. By tuning the inductance value, it is possible to perform various measurements under different system dynamics which reflects the damage effect. Therefore, if performed systematically, notably increased sets of measurement can be obtained, which will improve the inverse problem to be less underdetermined. Clearly, we can expect the accuracy and robustness in damage identification to be significantly enhanced. Numerical case study on localizing damage in a fixed-fixed beam using spectral element method is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method for structural damage identification.