Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Dual Mode Sensing With Low-Profile Piezoelectric Thin Wafer Sensors For Steel Bridge Crack Detection And Diagnosis, Lingyu Yu, S. Momeni, V. Godinez, Victor Giurgiutiu, Paul Ziehl, J. Yu

Faculty Publications

Monitoring of fatigue cracking in steel bridges is of high interest to many bridge owners and agencies. Due to the variety of deterioration sources and locations of bridge defects, there is currently no single method that can detect and address the potential sources globally. In this paper, we presented a dual mode sensing methodology integrating acoustic emission and ultrasonic wave inspection based on the use of low-profile piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS). After introducing the research background and piezoelectric sensing principles, PWAS crack detection in passive acoustic emission mode is first presented. Their acoustic emission detection capability has been validated …