Design and Testing of an Additively Manufactured Self-Sensing Composite Material

Abstract

The growing trend towards limited-life aircraft brings a host of new challenges for nondestructive evaluation of their condition. One approach is to use materials with integrated sensing which provide low-to-medium fidelity information for rapid decision-making. In this work, electrical impedance tomography is applied to additively manufactured polymer-matrix composite materials with leads and electrodes directly printed into the material volume. A computational study is presented that shows volumetric resolution of surface and sub-surface damage with embedded electrodes.