A Lightweight System With Ultralow-Power Consumption for Online Continuous Impact Monitoring of Aerospace Vehicle Structures

Abstract

Impact monitoring is important to the service safety of aerospace vehicle structures. The implementation of an impact monitoring system is essential because impacts must be monitored online continuously due to their rare, random, and transient nature. Therefore, an impact monitoring system needs to serve as an airborne system of the vehicle so that the system is required to be low in power consumption and lightweight. In this article, a piezoelectric-sensor-based impact monitoring system is proposed and implemented. The system can execute the complete monitoring process by itself, including acquiring sensor data, executing the monitoring algorithm, and storing the results. This monitoring process for each impact can be completed in 3.4 ms by the system. The static power consumption of the system is only 1.44 mW (the static current consumption is 0.38 mA). Furthermore, the system has 32 piezoelectric sensor channels and the weight is only 22 g. Therefore, a large-scale impact monitoring network can be easily constructed by using multiple systems. The system is evaluated on the composite stiffened skin of an unmanned aerial vehicle, and the impact monitoring accuracy rate reaches 96%.