Impact detection for structural health monitoring

This thesis presents impact localization method for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) using active sensors (e.g. piezoelectric transducers). The presented localization techniques are based on time difference of arrival (TDOA). An experimental system has been set up to test the approach. The piezoelectric transducers (sensors) are used as beacons to localize the impact. The measurement extraction is performed using the equipment from National Instruments. Experiments have demonstrated the validity of our approach which finds the impact position with a high accuracy.;It also studies the validity of horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) measure for geometry of sensor networks when detecting impacts in SHM. It also describes the experimental setup for validation. It is shown that HDOP correlates with the positioning error and can be used to characterize geometry influence.