Robust identification of strain waves due to low-velocity impact with different impactor stiffness

Low-velocity impacts represent a major concern for aeronautical structures, sometimes producing barely detectable damage that could severely hamper the aircraft safety, even with regards to metallic structures. For this reason, the development of an automated impact monitoring system is desired. From a passive monitoring perspective, any impact generates a strain wave that can be acquired using sensor networks; signal processing techniques allow for extracting features useful for impact identification, possibly in an automatic way. However, impact wave characteristics are related to the impactor stiffness; this presents a problem for the evaluation of an impact-related feature and for the development of an automatic approach to impact identification. This work discusses the problem of reducing the influence of the impactor stiffness on one of the features typically characterizing the impact event, i.e., the time of arrival (TOA). Two passive sensor networks composed of accelerometers and piezoelectric sensors are installed on two metallic specimens, consisting of an aluminum skin and a sandwich panel, with aluminum skins and NOMEX™ honeycomb core. The effect of different impactor stiffnesses is investigated by resorting to an impact hammer, equipped with different tips. Subsequently, a method for data processing is defined to obtain a feature insensitive to the impactor stiffness, and this method is applied to multiple impact signals for feature uncertainty evaluation.