Environmental Effects on Piezoelectric Sensors Array Signals and a Compensated Damage Imaging Method

Piezoelectric sensors array based damage imaging method as a high resolution source localization algorithm is becoming a promising method in structural health monitoring (SHM) technology. However, the environmental variations could affect the gain-phase of array signal. This paper experimentally evaluates the environmental effects on piezoelectric sensors array, and presents a compensated 2D-MUSIC based damage imaging method for composite structures. Firstly, detailed analysis and comparison discussion about the gain-phase difference of array signal when the environmental parameters change, and the gain-phase changes respect to the environmental parameters could be obtained. Secondly, array error matrix is structured and substituted into the steering vector of the original 2D-MUSIC algorithm to compensate. Finally, the compensated 2D-MUSIC algorithm is applied for estimating the initial estimates of damage. After substituting these initial estimates, the cost function is minimized by adaptive iterative calculating the reasonable location of the damage source. The experiments on an epoxy laminate plate demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.