Quantifying the performance of state of the art sensors to measure guided elastic waves

Elastic guided waves are carriers of information of the (change in) condition of plate-like structures like windturbine blades, airplane wings and road surfaces on bridges. To measure these guided waves we do not have to use piezos. Other sensors offer interesting benefits like contactless sensing, embedding, or measuring without electricity....

Piezoelectricity enhancement of P(VDF/TrFE) by X-ray irradiation

Organic electronics is becoming more and more important because the low level of fabrication and deposition complexity even at large scale makes it a good candidate for future low cost technological product development. P(VDF-TrFE) is a co-polymer of special interest due its ferroelectric property enabling usage in re-programmable non-volatile...

Sensing and Energy Harvesting Novel Polymer Composites

This chapter describes the development and properties of novel functional composite materials consisting of aligned piezo-ceramic particles or fibers in a polymeric matrix, which can be fully integrated in thermoset or thermoplastic products. The materials have a low potential for applications requiring actuation but have attractive sensorial...

Model-Based Design of Adaptive Embedded Systems

Today’s embedded systems have to operate in a wide variety of dynamically changing environmental circumstances. Adaptivity, the ability of a system to autonomously adapt itself, is a means to optimise a system’s behaviour to accommodate changes in its environment. It involves making in-product trade-offs between system qualities at system level....

Extremely stable piezo mechanisms for the New Gravitational Wave Observatory

Detection and observation of gravitational waves requires extreme stability in the frequency range 3e-5 Hz to 1 Hz. NGO/LISA will attain this by creating a giant interferometer in space, based on free floating proof masses in three spacecrafts. To operate NGO/LISA, the following piezo mechanisms are developed: 1. A piezo stack mechanism (Point...

Lifetime of piezoceramic multilayer actuators: Interplay of material properties and actuator design

We report an investigation into factors limiting the functional lifetime of multilayer piezoceramic actuators. The study consists of a combination of lifetime experiments by means of an accelerated lifetime test, inspection of the actuator microstructure at different stages of the accelerated lifetime test, and numerical simulation of the...