Technologies for In Situ Interrogation of Damage States in Structural Materials

The purpose of this SBIR Phase project is to develop a self-powering low-power consuming wireless active sensor architecture that will enable quantification of specific degradation states, failure modes, and usage conditions of structural components that simulates vehicle-operating conditions in harsh environments. Under this proposed SBIR project, the aggressive harsh environment operating active structural health diagnostic sensor/technique, viz., high-temperature piezoelectric wafer active sensors (HT-PWAS) will be developed. Ultimately, HT-PWAS is the structural health monitoring technique in aggressive harsh operating environments to make our self-powering wireless active structural health monitoring sensor architecture (Sp-WASHMS) versatile. SBIR Phase I incorporates three major functional elements, i.e., Energy Scavenging, HT-PWAS and Wireless Transceiving circuits to meet the SBIR requirements by demonstrating aggressive environment structural health diagnostic (HT-PWAS) technique. For the feasibility demonstration, structural damage active sensing at elevated temperatures will be performed on lab specimens (i.e., aircraft jet engine turbine blade and thermal protection system panel) to identify representative materials damage. Phase II is basically the full-scale development (FSD) of a robust field-use versatile Sp-WASHMS system for practical applications to aerospace vehicle power plant and structural thermal protection system (TPS).