STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF COMPOSITE ARMOR PANELS USING EMBEDDED ULTRASONIC GUIDED WAVE SENSOR ARRAYS

FBS Inc. is working with the TARDEC Electrified Armor Lab to develop a nondestructive structural health monitoring technology for composite armor panels that utilizes an array of embedded ultrasonic sensors for guided wave tomographic imaging. This technology would allow for periodic or real-time monitoring of armor integrity while being minimally intrusive and adding negligible weight. The technology is currently being developed and tested in pseudo composite armor panels and efforts are focused on reducing sensor array density, improving sensor integration procedures, and maximizing system sensitivity to damage. In addition to experimental testing and development, FBS is developing a highly-automated finite element model generation and analysis program to be used in conjunction with Abaqus/Explicit commercial finite element software. This program is specifically dedicated to modeling guided wave propagation in pseudo composite armor panels between embedded ultrasonic sensors. This software will allow TARDEC personnel to further investigate a wide array of sensor configurations and sensor densities and to evaluate the sensitivity of various feature extraction and tomography algorithms to damage of varying form and severity.