Development of smart bonded composite patch repair solution

This paper addresses the challenge rela ted to the repair of primary composite structures by proposing structu ral health monitoring (SHM) solutions to monitor the integrity of the bondline of a composite patch repair. The proposed smart repair relies on piezoelectric (PZT) transducers and have been tested with a step-sanded composite repair patch to detect artificial damage as well as impact induced damage to the bondline under varying operational conditions such as temperature change and vibration load. The repair solution was tested experimentally and showed promising results for structural integrity of bonded patch repairs.