Acoustic Emission Sensing using MEMS for Structural Health Monitoring: Demonstration of a Newly Designed Capacitive Micro Machined Ultrasonic Transducer

Among the various experimental techniques used for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), acoustic emission (AE) allows real time monitoring of large structures with the possibility to detect, characterize and locate damages. In practice, its implementation can be complex, especially for mobile structures. The main difficulties are related to the integration of sensors in the structure, electrical interconnections, different sources of noise, the detection and processing of transient signals and the management of massive data streaming. Generally, AE are collected through piezoelectric sensors. We propose an AEbased SHM methodology using an alternative technology in breakthrough with piezoelectric transduction: Capacitive micro-machined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs). These sensors have many advantages. One advantage lies in the size of the sensors allowing a little intrusive integration into the material. Following a previous work published in EWSHM’18, we report on the design, fabrication, and experimental demonstration of a new CMUT transducer specifically designed for the measurement of AE events. A data preprocessing methodology dedicated to interpret the obtained AE streaming is presented. We compare the results with standard piezoelectric sensors to detect damages during tensile tests on composite plates.