Structural Health Monitoring in Additive Manufactured Structures by Total Electrical Resistance Measurements

Structural health monitoring is an often-used method for in situ damage detection in systems caused by mechanical loads. State of the art is to implement conductive paths in a structure and to measure respective resistance. By using several paths, it is possible to locate damages, but this procedure accompanied by a great expenditure of time. In this work, the authors present a method to reduce the monitoring effort, by only measuring the total resistance of an electrical parallel connection. Therefore, specimens are manufactured in a two-component additive layer manufacturing (Arburg Plastic Freeforming) process by using an ABS polymer where one of the components is modified with carbon nanotubes to be electrically conductive. By applying electrical paths differing in resistance, conclusions can be made about the damage state of individual paths during the overall resistance measurement under mechanical load.