Use of piezoelectric patches in Health Usage and Monitoring Systems: a preliminary assessment

Macro Fiber Composite™ (MFC) piezoelectric devices have relevant potentialities as sensors, and a strong interest is currently growing in the aerospace field for their application in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) or Health Usage and Monitoring Systems (HUMS) of equipment’s, with special attention to the self-powered characteristics of these systems. In the first part of a research activity carried out in Pisa at the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering (DICI), as part of an existing collaboration with the R&D Division of the company MBDA Italia S.p.A., both the experimental and numerical characterization of simple structural elements instrumented with piezoelectric patches were executed. The studied structural element, a cantilevered carbon epoxy coupon with integrated MFC patches, was dynamically loaded with a shaker. The results of this preliminary characterization are shown and discussed. Finally, a single degree of freedom model is proposed that reproduces, as a first approximation, the behavior of each single vibration mode of the three-dimensional hybrid specimen.