Balance Technique for Monitoring In Situ Structural Integrity of Prismatic Structures
A general method to monitor the structural integrity of prismatic structures composed of simple isotropic linear elastic materials is described and justified by a detailed mathematical model. This technique is distinct from usual approaches in that a small number of distributed sensors is shown to be sensitive to the presence of damage throughout the entire volume of a structure without determining its location. In addition, this approach inherently operates as a binary sensor, thus alleviating the need to collect a large amount of data. Potential extensions to more general structural geometries and materials also are described.