Development of a Field-Portable Small-Size Impedance Analyzer for Structural Health Monitoring using the Electromechanical Impedance Technique

Electromechanical (E/M) impedance method is emerging as an effective and powerful technique for structural health monitoring. The E/M impedance method utilizes as its main apparatus an impedance analyzer that reads the in-situ E/M impedance of piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) attached to the monitored structure. Laboratory-type impedance analyzers (e.g. HP4194) are bulky, heavy, and expensive. They cannot be easily carried into the field for onsite structural health monitoring. To address this issue, means of to reduce the size of the impedance analyzer making the impedance analyzer more compact and field-portable are explored. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to the development of a field-portable small-size impedance analyzer for structural health monitoring using the electromechanical impedance technique. Our approach consists of several developmental stages. First, we perform a simulation of the E/M Impedance technique and develop the software tools for analyzing the signal in a fast and efficient way while maintaining the desired accuracy. The objective of this signal processing part is to obtain the complex impedance, ZR+iZI)=|Z| arg Z ∠ , at a number of frequencies in a predetermined range. Several signal processing methods were explored such as: (a) integration method; (b) correlation method; (c) Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) method. Second, we discuss the hardware issues associated with the implementation of this approach. The hardware system architecture consists of several blocks: (a) reference signal generation; (b) voltage and current measurements; and (c) digital signal acquisition and processing. Practical results obtained during proof-of-concept experiments are presented and comparatively examined.