Implementation of Piezoelectric Shape Sensors Using Digital Image Correlation

A practical procedure of implementing shape sensors for full-field deformation sensing of a structure is demonstrated in this extended abstract. The sensors are constructed using a piezoelectric film material which is bonded to the surface of a beam structure. The electrical outputs of the sensors are then calibrated such that the modal coordinates of the beam displacement can be measured. Calibration of the sensors is performed by using beam displacement data from high-speed 3D digital image correlation (DIC). Operational modal analysis is used to estimate mode shapes and to extract the modal coordinates from the DIC data. The shape sensor is then implemented by calibrating sensor voltages to the extracted modal coordinates. This extended abstract presents the procedure and results of this methodology on a beam instrumented with rectangular piezoelectric sensors of arbitrary length.