A Multi-Response-Based Wireless Impact Monitoring Network for Aircraft Composite Structures

Composite structures may be subjected to internal damages caused by impact events, which can seriously degrade the property of the structures. Hence, impact monitoring is of great importance to ensure the applications of composite, especially in aerospace engineering. This paper puts forward, for the first time, a new multi-response-based wireless sensor network (WSN) to realize the large-scale impact monitoring with the weight and complexity of the monitoring system reduced greatly. A novel multi-response-based global impact localization method that can unite multiple leaf nodes to solve the problems of localization confliction and mid-region localization is proposed for the WSN. Evaluations performed on large-scale complex composite structures have shown the advantages of the presented new methods.