In this paper, an in-situ damage detection framework for carbon fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRPs) is proposed. The methodology involves the design of an electromagnetic tomography (EMT) sensor and developing an absolute image reconstruction method for electromagnetic tomography. A linear EMT sensor is designed for in-situ structural health monitoring of CFRPs tensile load test specimens. A compatible multi-template supervised descent method (cmt-SDM) based on a normal mixture distribution model of pixels is proposed for EMT image reconstruction. The cmt-SDM was developed to overcome the ill-posed problem in absolute image reconstruction. Simulation and experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can be employed to monitor and evaluate the local damage degree of CFRPs specimens under quasi-static tensile loading. In addition, when the local fiber-breaking ratio reaches 40%, the damage location can be accurately reflected by the imaging results. Compared with the traditional SDM method, the method proposed in this paper shows smaller estimation error and delivers more accurate reconstructed images.

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer materials (CFRP) cause CFRP to bend or fail when subjected to external loads or impacts. In the case of static three-point bending, using the conductive properties of the carbon fiber inside the CFRP, the overall damage detection and failure prediction can be carried out by electromagnetic methods. The eddy current coil is used to realize real-time monitoring of damage, and the measured voltage value can be mapped to obtain the load of the sample. This paper conducts theoretical analysis and experimental verification, and obtains the relationship between CFRP stress damage and spatial conductivity change, and proposes a CFRP electromechanical coupling model under quasistatic three-point bending. Combined with the theory of electrically ineffective length, the CFRP three-point bending electromechanical coupling model was revised. Experimental results prove that the revised model can describe the load-conductivity change trend of three-dimensional braided CFRP more accurately, which provides a theoretical basis for monitoring the structural health of CFRP through electromagnetic methods.