3-D Elasticity-Based Modeling of Anisotropic Piezocomposite Transducers for Guided Wave Structural Health Monitoring

Anisotropic piezocomposite transducers (APTs), such as macro fiber composites and active fiber composites, have great potential to be used as structurally integrated transducers for guided-wave (GW) structural health monitoring. Their main advantages over conventional monolithic piezoceramic wafer transducers are mechanical flexibility, curved surface conformability, power efficiency, their ability to excite focused GW fields, and their unidirectional sensing capability as a GW sensor. In this paper, models are developed to describe excitation of GW fields by APTs in isotropic structures. The configurations explored are plane Lamb-wave fields in beams with rectangular cross-section, axisymmetric GW fields in cylinders, and 3-D GW fields in plates. The dynamics of the substrate and transducer are assumed uncoupled. The actuator is modeled as causing shear traction at the edges of the actuator’s active area along the fiber direction. The sensor is modeled as sensing the average extensional strain over the active area along the fiber direction. The work is unique in that the formulation is based on 3-D elasticity, and no reduced-order structural assumptions are used. This is crucial to model multimodal GW propagation, especially at high frequencies. A formulation is also proposed to model the behavior of APTs as GW sensors. Finally, results from experimental tests to examine the validity of the models are discussed and the possible sources of error are examined in detail.