Composites Design and Manufacture (Plymouth University teaching support materials) Smart materials and intelligent structures

Lecture PowerPoint

Review papers

Subject Index

Go directly to the biomimetics page

Smart materials and intelligent structures [1-15] comprise a wide ranging multidisciplinary activity embracing subjects ranging through polymer chemistry, materials research, sensor technology, signal processing techniques, novel mechanical and structural engineering and innovative approaches to control and actuation.

The distinction between smart and intelligent is not clear.  The word smart appears in one Japanese/(American) English dictionary as the Japanese for intelligent (EPSRC Newsline, September 1995)!

For our purpose here we will take:

• smart to be the repeatable response to a specific stimulus or combination of stimuli.  It is thus a conditioned/automatic/second nature response to the situation and does not require any form of decision taking on the part of the material or structure.
• intelligent will be restricted to those situations where the system has a choice of responses and a decision has to be made in respect of which action to take.

A material will always act in a predictable way (within the statistical variation inherent in the properties), whereas a structure may act in a predictable way, an indeterminate way or according to some control system.  A material cannot make a decision as to how to respond, but must respond in a consistent manner, unless the properties have been changed by its history (by fracture, yielding, heat treatment etc).  It has no capability to decide which action to take and therefore can only be smart according to the above definitions.  A structure may be either smart or intelligent.

Note that some so-called materials have complex internal structures and can only be considered as a single material when the scale at which they are considered is large in relation to the scale of the microstructure.  This is especially apparent in composite materials where the structure can only be considered homogeneous at a scale somewhat larger than the unit cell of the fabric reinforcement.

There are fundamentally three separate inter-acting parts to an intelligent structure.  These parts are embedded sensors (Table 1) > signal processing and control > actuator (Table 2).  Following from the above definitions, we can now separate smart (eg. photochromic glass or low melting point wax in a fire sprinkler) from intelligent (eg. active suspensions) such that the former does not have a control system and the latter has all the three required components.

Key issues in signal processing and control are data fusion for large sensor arrays and control protocols, e.g. genetic algorithms (GA) or fuzzy logic (FL) or artificial neural networks (ANN) or knowledge based systems (KBS)/artificial intelligence(AI)/expert systems).

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven ADAPTive Composites with Embedded Shape Memory Alloy Wires project presents a Video showing the shape change of a SMA-composite.

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) [55-56] are the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication technology. The electronics are fabricated using integrated circuit (IC) process sequences (e.g., CMOS, Bipolar, or BICMOS processes).  The micromechanical components are fabricated using compatible "micromachining" processes that selectively etch away parts of the silicon wafer or add new structural layers to form the mechanical and electromechanical devices.

A related technology is biomimetics (lessons from nature for engineering).

References

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    Book review from January 2005 Materials World (with references)
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Additional resources

• RS Dahiya and M Valle, Robotic Tactile Sensing: Technologies and System, Springer, Netherlands, 2013. ISBN 978-94-007-0578-4.
• R Elhajjar, V La Saponara and A Muliana, Smart Composites: Mechanics and Design, CRC Press, Boca Raton FL, 2013.  ISBN 978-1-4398-9591-7.
• MA Hamstad and GP Sendeckyj, Acoustic emission technology for smart structures, Journal of Acoustic Emission, 1993, 11(1), 33-41.
• J Lancaster, Composites get smart, Advanced Composites Engineering, March 1990, 5(2), 21-22.
• HR Nicholls and MH Lee, A survey of robot tactile sensing technology, The International Journal of Robotics Research, June 1989, 8(3), 3-30.
• D Roach, "Smart" Aircraft Structures: a Future Necessity - health monitoring of aircraft structures using distributed in situ sensor systems, High-Performance Composites, January 2007, 15(1), 28-30.