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Show 21 college of engineering Structural health monitoring systems are used to locate damage in aerospace and in other types of structures. The aeronautical industry invests time and money in structural health monitoring systems to locate damage in aircraft structures to increase their longevity and to ensure flight-worthiness. Composite materials (fiber-reinforced plastics) are becoming a more popular primary load-bearing material in aircraft because of their strength, stiffness, and resilience to corrosion. They are also susceptible to internal dam-age (for example, delamination) without any visual evidence, making it necessary to frequently monitor composite aircrafts for structural damage. This project presents a new approach to estimating the loca-tion of damage in aerospace structures using an array of piezoelectric sensors that passively monitor the structure for acoustic emission signals generated by damage mechanisms such as delamination, impacts, fatigue, etc. The approach involves estimating the time difference of arrival of the acoustic emission signals at the different sensors and then employing a functional minimization algorithm to locate the source of the acoustic emission. The method will be validated first through simulations in Matlab and then via a physical impact test. 2011-2012 University of Utah Board of Advisors/UROP Scholar ACOUSTIC SOURCE LOCALIZATION IN ANISOTROPIC STRUCTURES Peter Hillyard (V. John Mathews) Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS V. John Mathews Peter Hillyard |