The electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique, which employs piezoelectric–ceramic lead–zirconate–titarate (PZT) patches as impedance transducers, has emerged as a powerful nondestructive evaluation technique during the last few years. This series of two papers present a new simplified methodology to diagnose structural damages by means of surface bonded piezo-impedance transducers. The first part introduces a new PZT–structure electroelastic interaction model based on the concept of “effective impedance.” The proposed formulations can be conveniently employed to extract the mechanical impedance of any “unknown” structural system from the admittance signatures of a surface bonded PZT patch. This is an improvement over the existing models, whose complexity prohibits direct application in similar practical scenarios. This also eliminates the requirement of any a priori information concerning the phenomenological nature of the structure. The proposed model is experimentally verified by means of test on a s...

The electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique for structural health monitoring (SHM) and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) employs piezoelectric-ceramic (PZT) patches, which are surface bonded to the monitored structures using adhesives. The adhesive forms a finitely thick, permanent interfacial layer between the host structure and the patch. Hence, the force transmission between the structure and the patch occurs through the bond layer, via shear mechanism, invariably causing shear lag. However, the impedance models developed so far ignore the associated shear lag and idealize the force transfer to occur at the ends of the patch. This paper analyses the mechanism of force transfer through the bond layer and presents a step-by-step derivation to integrate the shear lag effect into impedance formulations, both one-dimensional and two-dimensional. Further, using the integrated model, the influence of various parameters (associated with the bond layer) on the electromechanical admittance response is studied by means of a parametric study. It is found that the bond layer can significantly modify the measured electromechanical admittance if not carefully controlled during the installation of the PZT patch.