Thermoplastic Induction Welded Joint Design for Structural Health Monitoring Damage Detectability

Abstract

In the present work, the design of thermoplastic induced welded joints was carried out considering different aspects related to structural performance, manufacturability and structural health monitoring capability. Three lap-joints configurations were considered: two of them having welded plates with two different carbon fibers plies stacked layups and one obtained by welding carbon fibers fabric laminates. A numerical analysis was carried out by performing (i) structural simulations to assess the mechanical properties of the joints, (ii) induction welding process simulations to evaluate temperature distribution in the welded interface area and (iii) damage detection assessment by reproducing the response of a structural health monitoring sensor bonded in correspondence of the joint overlap area. Electromagnetic-based structural health monitoring techniques were employed to evaluate local variation of electromagnetic characteristics due to defect presence. The results obtained show that the design choices have a significant influence on the physical properties of the welded material such as the electrical conductivity anisotropy. The different induced currents distribution obtained during both the fabrication and damage inspection phase, affects respectively the manufacturing and detection capability. An experimental validation was carried out by mechanical tests under quasi-static loading for the case with the best tradeoff between structural performance, manufacturing feasibility and damage detection capability. The proposed approach show the importance of taking into account the requirement of damage detectability from an early stage of the design.