Health Monitoring of a Composite Actuator with a PZT Ceramic during Electromechanical Fatigue Loading

This work describes an investigation into the feasibility of using an acoustic emission (AE) technique to evaluate the integrity of a composite actuator with a PZT ceramic under electromechanical cyclic loading. AE characteristics have been analyzed in terms of the behavior of the AE count rate and signal waveform in association with the performance degradation of the composite actuator during the cyclic tests. The results showed that the fatigue cracking of the composite actuator with a PZT ceramic occurred only in the PZT ceramic layer, and that the performance degradation caused by the fatigue damage varied immensely depending on the existence of a protecting composite bottom layer. We confirmed the correlations between the fatigue damage mechanisms and AE signal types for the actuators that exhibited multiple modes of fatigue damage; transgranular micro damage, intergranular fatigue cracking, and breakdown by a short circuiting were related to a burst type signal showing a shortly rising and slowly decaying waveform with a comparably low voltage, a continuous type signal showing a gradual rising and slowly decaying waveform with a very high voltage and a burst and continuous type signal with a high voltage, respectively. Results from the present work showed that the evolution of fatigue damage in the composite actuator with a PZT ceramic can be nondestructively identified via in situ AE monitoring and microscopic observations.