Cognitive Structural Health Monitoring and Its Key Technology

Inspired by the latest technological advances in the field of radar, a novel concept of cognitive Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is presented in this paper. Cognitive SHM refers to the SHM system that is capable of interacting intelligently with its environment by adapting both its transmit and receive functions based on contextual awareness and expert reasoning. With the concept of cognitive, a guided-wave SHIM method is developed to demonstrate the advantage of cognitive SHM. By numerical simulation, the capability of the presented method for detecting the damage near the edge of the structure under varying ambient temperature is validated. Meanwhile, the ingredients of cognitive SHIM as well as the future research steps are discussed.