Damage quantification using smart patch system for hot spot monitoring

Fatigue crack detection and quantification is by far the most challenging task in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). In the past decade numerous techniques were developed to detect and quantify fatigue damages. Fatigue loading leads to fatigue crack development in metals and delamination growth in composites. It has been found that different techniques are suitable for different damage development. Hence, the selection of the appropriate analysis methodologies pertaining to different problems is crucial. At the same time there has been an effort to reduce the power requirement for data analysis. This in turn triggered the idea of developing low power damage detection algorithms. In this paper a comparison between different damage detection techniques are presented and problems with different materials and structural geometries are considered. Three damage detection techniques were selected and evaluated.