A Large-scale and Lightweight Piezoelectric Sensor Network for Aircraft Smart Composite Skin

Abstract

Aircraft smart skin technology requires the integration of large-scale, lightweight and integrative sensor networks in aircraft structures, but it’s difficult to directly manufacture such networks at a large-scale, low-cost and simplified process. To study this issue, a large-scale and lightweight piezoelectric sensor network is developed in this article. The key principle is to manufacture the sensor network in a limited scale and expand it in a large scale for aircraft applications. The whole manufacturing process is realized by the mature Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) process, which can greatly reduce the manufacturing costs, simplify the process flow and improve the yield and stability of the sensor network. Serpentine-based fractal island-interconnect structure design combined with the FPC process is proposed to ensure the excellent stretchability of the network. It can be uniaxial stretched to 500% of its original size and works well when fully expanded to cover 2500% of its original area. Experimental results show that the network can be applied in active and passive Guided Wave (GW)-based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of composite structures.