Engineering Commons^™

An Artificial Intelligence Approach To Fatigue Crack Length Estimation From Acoustic Emission Signals, Shane T. Ennis

Theses and Dissertations

As in service aircraft begin to age and fatigue, a method for evaluating the operational life they are currently operating under and have remaining comes into question. Structural health monitoring is (SHM) is a popular method of structural analysis with growing interest in the aerospace industry. SHM is capable of damage assessment and structural life estimations.

The ultimate goal of the research presented in this thesis is to develop a methodology of classifying the length of a fatigue crack though the use of machine learning. The thesis has three major chapters as described below.

The first chapter deals with the …

Actuation And Sensing Applications Of Piezoelectric Transducers, Connor Griffin

Theses and Dissertations

Piezoelectric materials, defined by their ability to display a charge across their surface in response to mechanical strain, are great for use in actuation and sensing applications. Actuation applications include acoustic devices, motors and vibration damping while sensing applications include pressure sensors, medical devices, energy harvesting and structural health monitoring (SHM). The use of piezoelectric actuation and sensing across the lifecycle of aerospace metals is currently an expanding field with use cases beginning with the manufacturing process and ending with SHM.

The research presented in this thesis had three goals: (i) to develop methods for implementation of piezoelectric actuation in …

Speckle Development And Application In Uav-Based Digital Image Correlation For Transportation Infrastructure Monitoring And Assessment, Taylor Wyatt

Theses and Dissertations

A critical aspect of civil infrastructure is structural health monitoring, of which digital image correlation (DIC) has been proven to be an effective and appropriate method. There is sufficient literature on the use of stationary DIC, but an unexplored aspect is DIC-equipped unmanned aircraft systems. It has been verified in University of South Carolina labs but has not been proved in a field environment. One of the challenges of field implementation is large scale speckle application. This work focusses on identifying and addressing challenges in bringing UAV-DIC technology from the lab to the field. This includes the development of optimized …

An Acoustic Emission And Artificial Intelligence Approach To Structural Health Monitoring For Aerospace Application, Joseph Chandler Garrett

Theses and Dissertations

In the area of aerospace and other applications, structural health monitoring (SHM) has been a significant and growing area of research in recent years. Throughout the operational life of aerospace structures, various damage scenarios may manifest, and it is of great concern to the aerospace community to develop methodologies for detecting and assessing these damage scenarios. In this paper, fundamental research on the use of the acoustic emission (AE) approach to SHM for fatigue crack growth is presented. In general, the AE approach to SHM and non-destructive evaluation (NDE) involves the sensing of ultrasonic Lamb waves propagating through a structure. …

Guided-Wave Shm And Nde Of Composite Structures: Modeling And Experiments, Hanfei Mei

Theses and Dissertations

The extensive use of composites in aerospace structures has posed new challenges for implementing effective structural health monitoring (SHM) and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques due to the general anisotropic behavior and complex damage scenarios in composites. This dissertation addresses the SHM and NDE of composites using ultrasonic guided waves, with an emphasis on theoretical modeling and experimental validation of guided-wave propagation and interaction with damage in composites. A semi-analytical finite element (SAFE) approach is presented to calculate guided-wave dispersion curves in composites. The theoretical framework is formulated using the finite element method (FEM) to describe the material variation along the …

Acoustic Emission And Guided Wave Modeling And Experiments For Structural Health Monitoring And Non-Destructive Evaluation, Roshan Prakash Joseph

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is organized into major parts. In Part I of the dissertation, plate guided waves due to an acoustic emission (AE) event are analytically studied in the context of seismic moment tensor sources. The guided wave propagation elastodynamic equation corresponding to a point source applied to the plate in an arbitrary direction is modified in order to describe the case when the source is a seismic moment tensor of various tensor components. This part of the dissertation also discusses the analytical modeling of AE test sources such as pencil lead break, hammer hit excitation, etc.

In Part II of …

Guided Wave Based Integrated Structural Health Monitoring And Nondestructive Evaluation, Zhenhua Tian

Theses and Dissertations

Damage detection and health monitoring are critical for ensuring the structural safety in various fields, such as aerospace, civil and nuclear engineering. Structural health monitoring (SHM) performs online nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and can predict the structural remaining life through appropriate diagnosis and prognosis technologies. Among various SHM/NDE technologies, guided ultrasonic waves have shown great potential for fast and large area SHM/NDE, due to their sensitivity to small defects and capability to propagate long distances. Recent advances in guided wave based SHM/NDE technologies have demonstrated the feasibility of detecting damage in simple structures such as metallic plates and pipes. However, there …

Ultrasonics Transduction In Metallic And Composite Structures For Structural Health Monitoring Using Extensional And Shear Horizontal Piezoelectric Wafer Active Sensors, Ayman Kamal Abdelrahman

Theses and Dissertations

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is crucial for monitoring structures performance, detecting the initiation of flaws and damages, and predicting structural life span. The dissertation emphasizes on developing analytical and numerical models for ultrasonics transduction between piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS), and metallic and composite structures.

The first objective of this research is studying the power and energy transduction between PWAS and structure for the aim of optimizing guided waves mode tuning and PWAS electromechanical (E/M) impedance for power-efficient SHM systems. Analytical models for power and energy were developed based on exact Lamb wave solution with application on multimodal Lamb wave …

Structural Health Monitoring Using Linear And Nonlinear Ultrasonic Guided Waves, Yanfeng Shen

Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation addresses Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) using linear and nonlinear ultrasonic guided waves, with an emphasis on the development of analytical and numerical models of guided wave propagation and interaction with linear and nonlinear structural damage.

An analytical model was developed based on the exact Lamb wave solution for the simulation of Lamb wave propagation and interaction with damage. The damage effects were inserted into the model using complex valued wave damage interaction coefficients (WDICs). The analytical procedure was coded as a framework into a MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI), and the software WaveFormRevealer (WFR) was developed as a …

Structural Health Monitoring Of Composite Laminates Using Piezoelectric And Fiber Optics Sensors, Catalin Roman

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposes a new approach to structural health monitoring (SHM) for composite laminates using piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) and fiber optic bragg grating sensors (FBG). One major focus of this research was directed towards extending the theory of laminates to composite beams by combining the global matrix method (GMM) with the stiffness transfer matrix method (STMM). The STMM approach, developed by Rokhlin et al (2002), is unconditionally stable and is more computationally efficient than the transfer matrix method (TMM). Starting from theory, we developed different configurations for composite beams and validated the results from the developed analytical method …

Acoustic Emission Source Characterization Of Fatigue Crack Extension In Steel Bridge Material, Md Mozahid Hossain

Theses and Dissertations

The probability of Acoustic Emission (AE) detection associated with fatigue crack extension in steel bridge components is a difficult problem due to the complexity of the AE sources. AE is a very promising technique for structural health monitoring and automated micro-crack detection as it is generated by the material itself, unlike other nondestructive testing techniques (for example impact echo and ultrasonics), which require external input sources. Characterizing the source of AE is an ongoing challenge because AE sensors are not only sensitive to the AE signals but also to mechanical noise and reflections. It is therefore difficult to interpret the …