Active Ultrasonic Structural Health Monitoring Enabled by Piezoelectric Direct-Write Transducers and Edge Computing Process

While the active ultrasonic method is an attractive structural health monitoring (SHM) technology, many practical issues such as weight of transducers and cables, energy consumption, reliability and cost of implementation are restraining its application. To overcome these challenges, an active ultrasonic SHM technology enabled by a direct-write transducer (DWT) array and edge computing process is proposed in this work. The operation feasibility of the monitoring function is demonstrated with Lamb wave excited and detected by a linear DWT array fabricated in situ from piezoelectric P(VDF-TrFE) polymer coating on an aluminum alloy plate with a simulated defect. The DWT array features lightweight, small profile, high conformability, and implementation scalability, whilst the edge-computing circuit dedicatedly designed for the active ultrasonic SHM is able to perform signal processing at the sensor nodes before wirelessly transmitting the data to a remote host device. The successful implementation of edge-computing processes is able to greatly decrease the amount of data to be transferred by 331 times and decrease the total energy consumption for the wireless module by 224 times. The results and analyses show that the combination of the piezoelectric DWT and edge-computing process provides a promising technical solution for realizing practical wireless active ultrasonic SHM system.