A Circuit Design for Remote Structural Health Monitoring

Intelligent piezoelectric materials are helpful for monitoring the structural health. The principle of the piezoelectric impedance-based structural health monitoring (SHM) technique is to measure the electrical impedance of a piezoelectric patch attached to a structure in a certain frequency range. Electrical impedance variations indicate physical changes in the structure indirectly due to coupling between the electrical and mechanical impedances. This paper presents a circuit design which includes an impedance-based SHM circuits with wireless communication interface. The objective of this research is to develop a new hardware implementation which can be integrated using Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) techniques for further reduction on the device dimension and power dissipation. It is hoped that both piezoelectric patch and instrumentation device can be attached to a structure with telecommunication capability. The structural integrity can be monitored and the measurement can be acquired and processed at a remote terminal in a real-time manner.