Non-planar sensing skins for structural health monitoring based on electrical resistance tomography

TL;DR

This paper extends electrical resistance tomography (ERT) sensing skins to non-planar, arbitrarily shaped 3D structures by employing Riemannian geometry, enabling distributed structural health monitoring on complex surfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that generalizes ERT-based sensing skins to non-planar surfaces using Riemannian geometry, validated through numerical and experimental studies.

Findings

Feasibility of ERT-based sensing skins on non-planar geometries.

Successful numerical and experimental validation.

Potential for distributed health monitoring on complex structures.

Abstract

Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) -based distributed surface sensing systems, or sensing skins, offer alternative sensing techniques for structural health monitoring, providing capabilities for distributed sensing of, for example, damage, strain and temperature. Currently, however, the computational techniques utilized for sensing skins are limited to planar surfaces. In this paper, to overcome this limitation, we generalize the ERT-based surface sensing to non-planar surfaces covering arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional structures; We construct a framework in which we reformulate the image reconstruction problem of ERT using techniques of Riemannian geometry, and solve the resulting problem numerically. We test this framework in series of numerical and experimental studies. The results demonstrate that the feasibility of the proposed formulation and the applicability of ERT-based sensing skins for non-planar geometries.