Resumen de Robust damage detection in smart structures
Fahit Gharibnezhad
This thesis is devoted to present some novel techniques in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). SHM is a developing field that tries to monitor structures to make sure that they remain in their desired condition to avoid any catastrophe. SHM includes different levels from damage detection area to prognosis field. This work is dedicated to the first level, which might be considered the main and most important level. New techniques presented in this work are based on different statistical and signal processing methods such as Principal Component Analysis and its robust counterpart, Wavelet Transform, Fuzzy similarity, Andrew plots, etc. These techniques are applied on the propagated waves that are activated and captured in the structure using appropriate transducers. Piezoceramic (PZT) devices are chosen in this work to capture the signals due to their special characteristics such as high performance, low energy consumption and reasonable price. To guarantee the efficiency of the suggested techniques, they are tested on different laboratory and real scale test benchmarks, such as aluminum and composite plates, fuselage, wing skeleton, tube, etc. Because of the variety of tested benchmarks, this thesis is called damage detection in smart structures. This variety may promise the ability and capability of the proposed methods on different fields such as aerospace and gas/oil industry. In addition to the normal laboratory conditions, it is shown in this work that environmental changes can affect the performance of the damage detection and wave propagation significantly. As such, there is a vital need to consider their effect. In this work, temperature change is chosen as it is one of the main environmental fluctuation factors. To scrutinize its effect on damage detection, first, the effect of temperature is considered on wave propagation and then all the proposed methods are tested to check whether they are sensitive to temperature change or not. Finally, a temperature compensation method is applied to ensure that the proposed methods are stable and robust even when structures are subjected to variant environmental conditions.
