Design and Development of Magnetostrictive Actuators and Sensors for Structural Health Monitoring Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer composite (CFRP) is widely used in the aerospace industry, but is prone to delamination, which is a major causes of failure. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems need to be developed to determine the damage occurring within it. Our motivation is to design costeffective new sensors and a data acquisition system for magnetostrictive structural health monitoring of aerospace composites using a simple RLC circuit. The developed system is tested on magnetostrictive FeSiB and CoSiB actuator ribbons using a bending rig. Our results show detectable sensitivity of inductors as low as 0.6 xcexbcH for a bending rig radii between 600 to 300 mm (equivalent to 0.8 to 1.7 mStrain), which show a strain sensitivity resolution of 0.01 xcexbcStrain (surface area: 36 mm2). This value is at the detectability limit of our fabricated system. The best resolution (1.86 xcexbcStrain) was obtained from a 70turn copper (64 xcexbcH) wire inductor (surface area: 400 mm2) that was paired with a FeSiB actuator.

Review of Structural Health Monitoring Methods Regarding a MultiSensor Approach for Damage Assessment of Metal and Composite Structures Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the continuous onboard monitoring of a structurexe2x80x99s condition during operation by integrated systems of sensors. SHM is believed to have the potential to increase the safety of the structure while reducing its deadweight and downtime. Numerous SHM methods exist that allow the observation and assessment of different damages of different kinds of structures. Recently data fusion on different levels has been getting attention for joint damage evaluation by different SHM methods to achieve increased assessment accuracy and reliability. However, little attention is given to the question of which SHM methods are promising to combine. The current article addresses this issue by demonstrating the theoretical capabilities of a number of prominent SHM methods by comparing their fundamental physical models to the actual effects of damage on metal and composite structures. Furthermore, an overview of the stateoftheart damage assessment concepts for different levels of SHM is given. As a result, dynamic SHM methods using ultrasonic waves and vibrations appear to be very powerful but suffer from their sensitivity to environmental influences. Combining such dynamic methods with static strainbased or conductivitybased methods and with additional sensors for environmental entities might yield a robust multisensor SHM approach. For demonstration, a potent system of sensors is defined and a possible joint data evaluation scheme for a multisensor SHM approach is presented.