Performance of Smart Piezoelectric Transducers for Structural Health Monitoring on Composite Laminates in a Wide Range of Temperature Environments

In recent years, the impedance-based health monitoring technique has shown its promise in many applications. This technique makes use of the special properties of smart piezoelectric materials to identify the change of material properties due to the nucleation and progression of damage. A major advantage of this technique is that the procedure is nondestructive in nature and does not perturb the properties and performance of the materials and structures. This paper reports the results of applying the impedance-based nondestructive testing technique to the damage identification of composite laminates at cryogenic temperature. These materials have potential application for fuel tanks in future reusable launch vehicles and other applications. Special Single-Crystal Piezoceramic sensor/actuators are tested to assess their performance under a very wide range of temperature environments including cryogenic temperature. The results suggest that a linear relationship exists between the temperature and the measured data over a very wide range of temperatures. This relationship can be used to compensate the data collected in varying temperature environments and is an important tool for sensor data analysis.