Sensor strategy of electrical impedance tomography for carbon fiber reinforced plastic plate

As a new type of high-performance material, Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) has been widely used in aerospace and many other fields. The detection of damage during its service has attracted serious concern from researchers. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an internal detection technology that has been widely used in many fields such as medicine and multiphase flow monitoring. Because of its advantages of online detection and real-time monitoring, it has high application potential in the field of non-destructive testing and structural health monitoring, which has aroused the interest of scholars. Conventional EIT studies are mostly carried out on circular measurement domains, conventional sensor strategies of EIT system may not be applicable to CFRP structures in plate shapes. In this paper, the sensor strategy of EIT is investigated for the CFRP structure of plate shape. Three electrode array distribution strategies are proposed, and the damage image reconstruction results are compared by simulation. The results show that when the sensors are located on the upper and lower surfaces of the CFRP plate, it not only has a more uniform sensitivity distribution, but also obtains high-precision image reconstruction results containing depth direction information.