The third dataset dedicated to the Open Guided Waves platform aims at carbon fiber composite plates with an additional omega stringer at constant temperature conditions. The two structures used in this work are representative for real aircraft components. Comprehensive measurements were recorded in order to study (I) the impact of the omega stringer on guided wave propagation, and (II) elliptical reference damages of different sizes located at three separate positions on the structure. Measurements were recorded for narrowband excitation (5-cycle toneburst with varying carrier frequencies) and broadband excitation (using chirp waveforms). The paper presents the results of a technical validation including numerical modelling, and enables further research, for example related to probability of detection (POD) analysis.

Moisture diffusion in carbon fiber composites changes the mechanical properties of the composite. Therefore, a monitoring method of the actual content of moisture in the composite is important. However, at the moment there are no online methods established. A common method is the measurement of the mass changes due to water uptake. This method is not suitable for online monitoring of a real composite part in service. We demonstrate that miniaturized flexible interdigital sensors are suitable for moisture measurement inside the carbon fiber composite. These sensors are directly integrated inside the composite. It was already demonstrated that these can be successfully used for resin-curing monitoring as a primary application. Here we demonstrate that the same sensors are also suitable for moisture measurement inside the material. In order to do so, we expose samples with and without integrated sensors to hot-wet conditions and measure the dielectric changes with the sensors and the mass gain. The moisture concentration and the measured admittance can be directly correlated to each other. This demonstrates that the sensors can be used for moisture measurement as a secondary application. In addition, it is shown that the sensors have the potential to measure the moisture locally inside the material.

Monitoring of mechanical structures is a Big Data challenge and includes Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Non-destructive Testing (NDT). The sensor data produced by common measuring techniques, e.g., guided wave propagation analysis, is characterized by a high dimensionality in the temporal and spatial domain. There are off- and on-line methods applied at maintenance- or run-time, respectively. On-line methods (SHM) usually are constrained by low-resource processing platforms, sensor noise, unreliability, and real-time operation requiring advanced and efficient sensor data processing. Commonly, structural monitoring is a task that maps high-dimensional input data on low-dimensional output data (information, which is feature extraction), e.g., in the simplest case a Boolean output variable “Damaged”. Machine Learning (ML), e.g., supervised learning, can be used to derive such a mapping function. But ML quality and performance depends strongly on the input data size. Therefore, adaptive and reliable input data reduction (that is feature selection) is required at the first layer of an automatic structural monitoring system. Assuming some kind of two-dimensional sensor data (or n-dimensional data in general), image segmentation can be used to identify Regions of Interest (ROI), e.g., of wave propagation fields. Wave propagation in materials underlie reflections that must be distinguished, especially in hybrid materials (e.g., combining metal and fibre-plastic composites) there are complex wave propagation fields. The image segmentation is one of the most crucial parts of image processing. Major difficulties in image segmentation are noise and the differing homogeneity (fuzziness and signal gradients) of regions, complicating the definition of suitable threshold conditions for the edge detection or region splitting/clustering. Many traditional image segmentation algorithms are constrained by this issue. Artificial Intelligence can aid to overcome this limitation by using autonomous agents as an adaptive and self-organizing software architecture, presented in this work. Using a collection of co-operating agents decomposes a large and complex problem in smaller and simpler problems with a Divide-and-Conquer approach. Related to the image segmentation scenario, agents are working mostly autonomous (de-coupled) on dynamically bounded data from different regions of a signal or an image (i.e., distributed with simulated mobility), adapted to the locality, being reliable and less sensitive to noisy sensor data. In this work, self-organizing agents perform segmentation. They are evaluated with measured high-dimensional data from piezo-electric acusto-ultrasonic sensors recording the wave propagation in plate-like structures. Commonly, SHM deploys only a small set of sensors and actuators at static positions delivering only a few temporal resolved sensor signals (1D), whereas NDT methods additionally can use spatial scanning to create images of wave signals (2D). Both one-dimensional temporal and two-dimensional spatial segmentation are considered to find characteristic ROI.