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 on-site 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| angle 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.