Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Gangbing Song

Motivation

Piezoelectric materials, particularly PZT (Lead Zirconate Titanate), are used for structural vibration monitoring and control in mechanical, civil and aerospace engineering. PZTs can be used as a sensor or as an actuator. When used as a sensor, PZTs generate a charge proportional to the strain that the material is subject to. PZT sensors can be treated as variable capacitors in series with a voltage source. On the other hand, when PZT is used as an actuator, it requires high voltage to control them since they consume mostly reactive power.

Currently, when multiple sensors are deployed, the signals are sent back to the data acquisition board using one long cable per sensor. Since the cables present an obstacle to the future application of the PZT patches, it is critical to design and fabricate a low power wireless transceiver for PZTs. The wireless transceiver should be capable of two-way communications. Overall, the system should include a signal conditioning circuit for normalizing the PZT sensor signal, a function generator circuit to send excitation signal to the PZT actuator, and a wireless transceiver to exchange data with the base station (Computer).

Potential Applications

• Structural health monitoring of civil and mechanical systems
• Collision detect and evaluation for civil structures
• Vibration monitoring in general

Undergraduate Opportunities

This project is very well suited for students interested in wireless telecommunications and remote data acquisition. The Smart Materials and Structures Laboratory has several graduate students, including two from Electrical and Computer Engineering, will give guidance to your design projects. In addition, a test bed with ten piezoelectric sensors is available to use.