Structural Health Monitoring of Composite Materials

Composite materials owing to low density and beneficial properties such as high stiffness, low coefficient of thermal expansion, high mechanical strength, high dimensional stability, good wear resistance, and design flexibility are employed in various fields such as aeronautical, automobile, power generation, civil, and marine engineering etc. Over their course of service, damages can arise in the composite material due to aging, improper service conditions, and erroneous manufacturing and assembly such as inter-laminar voids, porosity, fibre waviness, wrinkles, de-bonding, and delamination. Techniques like structural health monitoring which utilize traditional techniques integrated with sensors to inspect the health of a structure can assist in localization and quantification of several types of damages present in composites based structural models. In this work, several monitoring methods have been reviewed for damage detection including vibration based sensing, embedded sensing, acoustic emissions, lamb wave method, and comparative vacuum monitoring. Several researchers have focused their study on the health monitoring of operational bridges, buildings, and aerospace vehicles for damage detection.