The growing demand from aerospace, civil, marine and energy industries for safer and technologically advanced structures with extended service life has led to the development of innovative acoustic/ultrasonic structural health monitoring (SHM) inspection systems. SHM technology enables the identification of material discontinuities (e.g. cracks) and changes of geometric properties of structural systems by measuring the release of elastic energy in the form of acoustic emission (AE) waves. Static and dynamic (e.g. fatigue) loading, corrosion cracks and sudden events (e.g. impacts) can induce rearrangements of local stresses even before failure occurs, thus generating AE waves. These waves are detected using arrays of transducers (often piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate, PZT) that can be surface bonded or embedded into the component. The acquired waveforms are then converted into electric signals and processed to generate damage-sensitive features, thus providing real-time information of structural health conditions. The main advantages of SHM technology are the enhancement of inspection procedures and the reduction of inspection time and operative/maintenance costs. The assessment of structural components is, therefore, an inverse problem that uses measured data to identify and assess discontinuities via innovative algorithms. Among SHM techniques, the most widely used are statistical and genetic methods, which are capable of reliably diagnosing and classifying damage through the clustering and processing of acoustic/ultrasonic data.
This Frontiers Research Topic on “Acoustic and Ultrasonic Methods for Structural Health Monitoring” welcomes submissions across different areas of SHM including innovative acoustic/ultrasonic algorithms, novel machine learning and computer vision (imaging) techniques, new sensing integration technology (e.g. PZT transducers and optical fibres embedded into composite materials) and ground-breaking damage-feature extraction methods. This Research Topic also involves the development of innovative wireless SHM network nodes, advanced microelectronics applied to sensing technology and new transceiver systems for the implementation of both active and passive monitoring of engineering components.
The growing demand from aerospace, civil, marine and energy industries for safer and technologically advanced structures with extended service life has led to the development of innovative acoustic/ultrasonic structural health monitoring (SHM) inspection systems. SHM technology enables the identification of material discontinuities (e.g. cracks) and changes of geometric properties of structural systems by measuring the release of elastic energy in the form of acoustic emission (AE) waves. Static and dynamic (e.g. fatigue) loading, corrosion cracks and sudden events (e.g. impacts) can induce rearrangements of local stresses even before failure occurs, thus generating AE waves. These waves are detected using arrays of transducers (often piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate, PZT) that can be surface bonded or embedded into the component. The acquired waveforms are then converted into electric signals and processed to generate damage-sensitive features, thus providing real-time information of structural health conditions. The main advantages of SHM technology are the enhancement of inspection procedures and the reduction of inspection time and operative/maintenance costs. The assessment of structural components is, therefore, an inverse problem that uses measured data to identify and assess discontinuities via innovative algorithms. Among SHM techniques, the most widely used are statistical and genetic methods, which are capable of reliably diagnosing and classifying damage through the clustering and processing of acoustic/ultrasonic data.
This Frontiers Research Topic on “Acoustic and Ultrasonic Methods for Structural Health Monitoring” welcomes submissions across different areas of SHM including innovative acoustic/ultrasonic algorithms, novel machine learning and computer vision (imaging) techniques, new sensing integration technology (e.g. PZT transducers and optical fibres embedded into composite materials) and ground-breaking damage-feature extraction methods. This Research Topic also involves the development of innovative wireless SHM network nodes, advanced microelectronics applied to sensing technology and new transceiver systems for the implementation of both active and passive monitoring of engineering components.
