Research and development related to homeland security has emerged as one of the most challenging topics nationwide in the recent few years. Effective structural health monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis are of great importance for the safety and reliability analysis for civil infrastructural systems. While the technologies of sensor-arrays embedded in host structures are widely employed for structural health monitoring, the key issue is how to set-up a physics-based model framework and its corresponding efficient algorithm to evaluate the quality of the host structures through the output of the sensors. It is a frontal interdisciplinary topic bridging the microstructural damage mechanics and signal estimation theory. By employing a multi-scale constitutive model of solids with damage, this paper conducts an exploratory research on the modeling and algorithm of estimating the mean value of crack density and the distribution of crack orientation of a cracked plate subjected to unidirectional tension. Simulation results reveal that the framework and algorithm provide a reasonable performance in recovering crack orientation.

Date Published: 16 March 2006
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 6178, Nonintrusive Inspection, Structures Monitoring, and Smart Systems for Homeland Security, 617805 (16 March 2006);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6178:
Nonintrusive Inspection, Structures Monitoring, and Smart Systems for Homeland Security
Aaron A. Diaz; H. Felix Wu; Steven R. Doctor; Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Editor(s)