Opportunities and Challenges for Electromagnetic Materials and Structural Health Monitoring

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Peter Nagy's plenary presentation from SPIE Smart Structures/NDE 2012.
Abstract: Electromagnetic nonde- structive evaluation (NDE) methods offer unique opportunities for health monitoring of materials and structures. A variety of sensors can be built based on electromagnetic principles to detect and quantitatively characterize subtle environmentally-assisted and/or service-related changes in the state of metals, such as micro-structural evolution, phase transformation, plastic deformation, hardening, residual stress relax- ation, etc., as well as to monitor size and shape changes due to creep deformation and less subtle effects such as corrosion and erosion. In most cases, the detection sensitivity is sufficiently high for the purposes of health monitoring and the feasibility of any given sensing method is mainly determined by its selectivity, or the lack of it, to a particular type of damage mechanism. This talk will review recent developments in electromagnetic materials characterization and in-situ health monitoring and will offer a feasibility assessment of these nondestructive methods through a couple of representative examples of broad interest.