Composite Nanofibers for Structural Health Monitoring

To ensure structural integrity and safety, in-service health monitoring techniques are employed in many engineering areas. The safety, cost and performance issues of these health and usage monitoring techniques are particularly important in the aviation industry. At present monitoring techniques are primarily based on pessimistic predictions and periodic inspections, which are costly and inefficient. Smart solutions to health and usage monitoring techniques relates to systems including sensors for damage detection combined with advanced signal processing and analysis. The sensitivity of sensors to damage and the reliability of performance as well as low cost of integration are the major requirements. Electrospun polymer nanofiber (NF) materials have attracted tremendous interest in sensor applications as their sensing surface area dramatically increases with decreasing fiber diameter. The highly tunable composition and surface functionality of the NF material facilitate its versatile sensibility to a wide range of visible and invisible environmental stimulus. In this presentation, we introduce three classes of nanocomposite fibers that have potential for highly sensitive large area sensing of various stimuli.