An integrated system for active vibro-acoustic control and damage detection on a typical aeronautical structure

The present work relates to the assessment and testing of a system both devoted to the active noise and vibration control and to the structure health monitoring, based upon the use of piezoelectric devices. In the control application, the piezoelectric devices (in form of patches) play the role of actuators; their induced vibration field (generally named as secondary one) has, in fact, the target to reduce the primary one through a punctual interference (phase opposition or shifting). In the health monitoring application, the piezo devices play both the role of actuators and sensors. In fact the developed technique is primarily based upon the evaluation and comparison of the structure frequency response functions that intrinsically contains all the information regarding the structural properties whose change may be correlated with incipient damages. For such an application a set of piezo is so used to induce a vibration field and another set (or the same one) is used to pick up the structure dynamic response to be next post processed, to extrapolate an uniquely and easily interpreted damage index. Due to the similarity of the hardware devices which both the applications are based on, a possibility of their integration seems to be affordable and also economically advantageous