Improving accuracy of damage quantification based on two-level consistency control of PZT layers

Structural health monitoring-based quantitative damage diagnosis technique plays a key role in real-time condition monitoring. Among the current research, piezoelectric (PZT) sensor and Guided Wave (GW) based damage quantification methods are promising, which normally establish a calibration model between GW feature and damage degree by experiments on batch specimens, and then conduct the calibration model on the monitored specimen. However, the accuracy of PZT and GW based damage quantification is affected by dispersion introduced by sensor network performance, structural material, and damage propagation among the adopted batch specimens. For improving the accuracy of damage quantification, this paper adopts PZT layer as sensor network and creatively implements theoretical and experimental research on batch PZT layers consistency control. On one hand, a two-level consistency control method based on multidimensional features-Euclidean distance is proposed to ensure the performance consistency of PZT layers placed on different specimens. On the other hand, experimental research on typical aircraft lug structures is also carried out to evaluate the requirement on performance consistency of PZT layers when performing quantitative damage diagnosis, and further verify the proposed two-level consistency control method. Experimental results show that the accuracy of damage quantification raises by 38% when the dispersion of different PZT layers is controlled within 5%.