A Robust Expansion Process Technology for Deployment of Stretchable Sensor Networks

The development of smart structures in the context of aerospace, automotive, and infrastructure engineering is a grand engineering challenge that has received increased interest in recent years [1-3]. With this increased interest comes a growing need for sensor networks that can be permanently integrated into the structural elements of buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure, providing health monitoring and state awareness to these elements while in service. The Structures and Composites Lab at Stanford University has developed a sensor network architecture that is capable of stretching from a 100mm wafer to cover a 1m2 area in temperature, impact, and strain sensors, and is permanently integrable within laminated structures [4]. In this paper, automated stretching and deployment of a structural “dummy” of this network over a designed 2-D area is performed and examined for the first time.