ABSTRACT

In the recent decades, structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted more and more interest in the engineering community. Its applications cover a broad bandwidth from civil engineering to aerospace applications, especially in aircraft industry. In fact, the idea of SHM is to allow nondestructive testing (NDT) methods become an integral part of the structures [1,2]. As a novel piezoelectric device, metal core piezoelectric fiber (MPF) has great potential to be a structurally integrated transducer for guided-wave SHM. Compared with common piezoelectric ceramics with in-plane isotropic characteristic [3–5], MPF exhibits unique directivity in Lamb wave sensing, which can locate the direction of the incoming wave without any information about the time of flight or the speed of propagation.