Structural health monitoring of plastic components with piezoelectric sensors

Due to the material changes of components from metal to plastic or composite materials, the structural health monitoring finds more and more interest in the industrial fields. The reason is that these materials are more vulnerable to damage or impacts which cannot be optically detected. In this contribution we present a method to analyze the structure of plastic components with piezo-electrical sensors and actuators. The components are stimulated by actuators, and sensors capture the injected vibrations. These signals are decomposed into Intrinsic Mode Functions to compute statistical features. A Fuzzy-Pattern-Classifier is applied to detect structural modifications at the components under test.