Embedded sensing for structural health monitoring is a rapidly expanding field, propelled by algorithmic advances in structural health monitoring and the ever-shrinking size and cost of electronic hardware necessary for its implementation. Although commercial systems are available to perform the relevant tasks, they are usually bulky and/or expensive because of their high degree of general utility to a wider range of applications. As a result, multiple separate devices may be required in order to obtain the same results that could be obtained with a structural health monitoring–specific device. This work presents the development and deployment of a versatile, Wireless Active-Sensing Platform, designed for the particular needs of embedded sensing for multi-scale structural health monitoring. The Wireless Active-Sensing Platform combines a conventional data acquisition ability to record voltage output (e.g. from strain or acceleration transducers) with ultrasonic guided wave-based active-sensing, and a seamlessly integrated impedance measurement mode, enabling impedance-based structural health monitoring and piezoelectric sensor diagnostics to reduce the potential for false positives in damage identification. The motivation, capabilities, and hardware design for the Wireless Active-Sensing Platform are reviewed, and three deployment examples are presented, each demonstrating an important aspect of embedded sensing for structural health monitoring.

© 2014 IEEE. In this paper, a new transmissibility analysis method is proposed for the detection and location of damage via nonlinear features in multidegree-of-freedom (MDOF) structural systems. The method is derived based on the transmissibility of nonlinear output frequency response functions (NOFRFs), a concept recently proposed to extend the traditional transmissibility concept to the nonlinear case. The implementation of the method is only based on measured system output responses and by evaluating and analyzing the transmissibility of these system responses at super-harmonics. This overcomes the problems with available techniques, which assume there is one damaged component with nonlinear features in the system and/or require loading on inspected structural systems is measurable. Both numerical simulation studies and experimental data analysis have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and demonstrate the potential practical applications of the new method.

This article presents a performance optimization approach to incipient crack detection in a wind turbine rotor blade that underwent fatigue loading to failure. The objective of this article is to determine an optimal demarcation date, which is required to properly normalize active-sensing data collected and processed using disparate methods for the purpose of damage detection performance comparison. We propose that maximizing average damage detection performance with respect to a demarcation date would provide both an estimate of the true incipient damage onset date and the proper normalization enabling comparison of detection performance among the otherwise disparate data sets. This work focuses on the use of ultrasonic guided waves to detect incipient damage prior to the surfacing of a visible, catastrophic crack. The blade was instrumented with piezoelectric transducers, which were used in a pitch-catch mode over a range of excitation frequencies. With respect to specific excitation frequencies and transmission paths, higher excitation frequencies provided consistent detection results for paths along the rotor blade's carbon fiber spar cap, but performance fell off with increasing excitation frequency for paths not along the spar cap. Lower excitation frequencies provided consistent detection performance among all sensor paths. © 2013 The Author(s).