A Large-Scale Sensing-Monitoring Integrated Aircraft Smart Skin with Ultralow Weight and Ultralow Power Consumption for Structural Health Monitoring
Yu Wang, Chongqi Wang, Wei Pu, Lei Qiu
Abstract
Impact monitoring is important for ensuring aircraft service safety. Usually, a large-scale piezoelectric transducer (PZT) network is arranged and connected to a monitoring system via heavy cables to implement impact monitoring. This may lead to problems like a tedious layout process, large additional weight, and high-power consumption. To study this issue, a large-scale sensing-monitoring integrated aircraft smart skin (SMIASS) with ultralow weight and ultralow power consumption is developed for impact monitoring in this article. It is composed of a PZT network system and a skin structure. The network system contains an expandable PZT network based on stretchable island-bridge structures, a flexible impact monitoring system, and semiexpandable transition wires connecting them. Shared signal transmission wires design and digital impact region localization method are adopted to reduce the number of wires, the additional weight, and power consumption. It can be manufactured by the flexible printing circuit process on a small scale and expanded to 5000% of its original size to integrate with a large-scale composite skin, forming an SMIASS. Experimental results show that the SMIASS can accurately localize the impact subregions with an ultralow additional weight of less than 11 g/m<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and an ultralow power consumption of less than 0.87 mW/m<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>.