Bridges Structural Health Monitoring and Deterioration Detection Synthesis of Knowledge and Technology

INE/AUTC 10.0

Piezo-electromechanical smart materials with distributed arrays of piezoelectric transducers: Current and upcoming applications

This review paper intends to gather and organize a series of works which discuss the possibility of exploiting the mechanical properties of distributed arrays of piezoelectric transducers. The concept can be described as follows: on every structural member one can uniformly distribute an array of piezoelectric transducers whose electric terminals are to be connected to a suitably optimized electric waveguide. If the aim of such a modification is identified to be the suppression of mechanical vibrations then the optimal electric waveguide is identified to be the 'electric analog' of the considered structural member. The obtained electromechanical systems were called PEM (PiezoElectroMechanical) structures. The authors especially focus on the role played by Lagrange methods in the design of these analog circuits and in the study of PEM structures and we suggest some possible research developments in the conception of new devices, in their study and in their technological application. Other potential uses of PEMs, such as Structural Health Monitoring and Energy Harvesting, are described as well. PEM structures can be regarded as a particular kind of smart materials, i.e. materials especially designed and engineered to show a specific andwell-defined response to external excitations: for this reason, the authors try to find connection between PEM beams and plates and some micromorphic materials whose properties as carriers of waves have been studied recently. Finally, this paper aims to establish some links among some concepts which are used in different cultural groups, as smart structure, metamaterial and functional structural modifications, showing how appropriate would be to avoid the use of different names for similar concepts. © 2015 - IOS Press and the authors

Variational principles in numerical practice

Variational principles represent a general framework for determining the mechanical state of a system, by identifying its motion as a minimum of a pertinent functional. Moreover, finite element methods are naturally based on variational principles and provide a very powerful tool for numerically solving many mechanical as well as other multi-physics problems. The purpose of the present note is to illustrate some recent applications with special reference to biomechanics and dissipation in quasi-brittle materials and piezo-electromechanical structures, in order to confirm the validation and to highlight the bright prospects of this method

A sub-Nyquist co-prime sampling music spectral approach for natural frequency identification of white-noise excited structures

Motivated by practical needs to reduce data transmission payloads in wireless sensors for vibration-based monitoring of civil engineering structures, this paper proposes a novel approach for identifying resonant frequencies of white-noise excited structures using acceleration measurements acquired at rates significantly below the Nyquist rate. The approach adopts the deterministic co-prime sub-Nyquist sampling scheme, originally developed to facilitate telecommunication applications, to estimate the autocorrelation function of response acceleration time-histories of low-amplitude white-noise excited structures treated as realizations of a stationary stochastic process. This is achieved without posing any sparsity conditions to the signals. Next, the standard MUSIC algorithm is applied to the estimated autocorrelation function to derive a denoised super-resolution pseudo-spectrum in which natural frequencies are marked by prominent spikes. The accuracy and applicability of the proposed approach is numerically assessed using computer-generated noise-corrupted acceleration time-history data obtained by a simulation-based framework pertaining to a white-noise excited structural system with two closely-spaced modes of vibration carrying the same amount of energy, and a third isolated weakly excited vibrating mode. All three natural frequencies are accurately identified by sampling at as low as 78% below Nyquist rate for signal to noise ratio as low as 0dB (i.e., energy of additive white noise equal to the signal energy), suggesting that the proposed approach is robust and noise-immune while it can reduce data transmission requirements in acceleration wireless sensors for natural frequency identification of engineering structures

Dynamic problems for metamaterials: Review of existing models and ideas for further research

Metamaterials are materials especially engineered to have a peculiar physical behaviour, to be exploited for some well-specified technological application. In this context we focus on the conception of general micro-structured continua, with particular attention to piezoelectromechanical structures, having a strong coupling between macroscopic motion and some internal degrees of freedom, which may be electric or, more generally, related to some micro-motion. An interesting class of problems in this context regards the design of wave-guides aimed to control wave propagation. The description of the state of the art is followed by some hints addressed to describe some possible research developments and in particular to design optimal design techniques for bone reconstruction or systems which may block wave propagation in some frequency ranges, in both linear and non-linear fields. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Performances of passive electric networks and piezoelectric transducers for beam vibration control

This thesis is focused on beam vibration control using piezoelectric transducers and passive electric networks. The first part of this study deals with the modeling and the analysis of stepped piezoelectric beams. A refined one-dimensional model is derived and experimentally validated. The modal properties are determined with four numerical methods. A homogenized model of stepped periodic piezoelectric beams is derived by using two-scale convergence. The second part deals with the performance analysis of three passive circuits in damping structural vibrations: the piezoelectric shunting, the second order transmission line and the fourth order transmission line. The effects of uncertainties of the electric parameters on the system performances are analyzed. Theoretical predictions are validated through different experimental setup