Monitoring of cracks at an open hole using built-in fibre wave piezoelectric transducers

Abstract

This contribution is related to the first application in structural health monitoring network using fibre wave piezoelectric transducers. Fibre wave piezoelectric transducers are applied to ultrasound-based active diagnostics of the crack propagation in the vicinity of an open hole. The usefulness of the fibre wave piezoelectric transducer is demonstrated in the artificial and fatigue crack monitoring experiments. Since the fibre wave piezoelectric transducer possesses jointly many portions of the inherent merits of the fibre optic ultrasonic sensor and the piezoelectric transducer, this paper proposes it as an improved built-in ultrasonic transducer for monitoring the structural integrity of local structural hot spots.