STATISTICAL PROCESS CONTROL (SPC) OF DAMAGE METRICS IN THE IMPEDANCE-BASED STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING

 ABSTRACT: Statistical Process Control (SPC) stands out for the use of control charts and for repeatability and reproducibility (R&R) techniques. This work aimed at its applications in the aspects of pre-processing of structural monitoring. The experiment was carried out in a completely randomized design (CRD) with two sources of variation: eight aluminum beams with piezoelectric patches and five types of damage (D1 = baseline, D2 = 0.6g, D3 = 1.1g, D4 = 1.6g, D5 = 2.2g). All measurements were gathered at 30C and with 20 repetitions for each condition case, producing a damage metric. In the R&R study, a low variation of repetition was observed (9.84%), but a high reproducibility (72.39%), representing that the damage metrics were similar for each situation, but a high variation among beams and damages. Based on this evaluation, the control charts helped to verify in which beams and damages these greatest variabilities were found. Concluding, the control charts for mean and individual measures as well as the R&R study were interesting tools for raw data preprocessing step for measurement error detection. 