Modified Acoustic Emission for Prognostic Health Monitoring

Prime Photonics proposes to team with Dr. Duke of Virginia Tech to develop a multi-mode, enhanced piezoelectric acoustic emission sensing system to couple large damage events to local distribution of damage accommodation. Our system will be centered around an instrument designed to accept the output of a piezoelectric transducer sensitive to in-plane acoustic events. The signal processing path will not only monitor high energy acoustic emission events to detect impact events, but also transitions in the background power spectral density of the acoustic emission events, and real time strain. The system will be designed to operate with macro fiber composite (MFCs) sensors to provide the simultaneous AE and strain detection, but will also accept as inputs traditional isometric type transducers. Augmentation of background acoustic energy transition states with temporal and spatial information about impact and strain enables unprecedented non-destructive evaluation capabilities to enable semi-autonomous structural health monitoring of systems and components.