Nonplanar sensing skins for structural health monitoring based on electrical resistance tomography

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 nonplanar 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 the feasibility of the proposed formulation and the applicability of ERT-based sensing skins to nonplanar geometries.