Abstract:
To address the challenge of accurately acquiring structural damage information caused by hypervelocity impacts from space debris and micrometeoroids, this paper proposes an impact damage monitoring method that integrates resistive grid and acoustic emission (AE) technologies. A resistive grid sensor with orthogonal wire arrays was designed and fabricated, enabling the identification of damage location and size by analyzing resistance changes before and after an impact event. Concurrently, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric film sensors were used to capture the AE signals generated by the impact. A probabilistic localization method based on Bayesian parameter estimation was then employed to identify the impact location and quantify its uncertainty in the form of confidence intervals. Hypervelocity impact tests were conducted. The results show that under a single-impact condition, actual damage approximately 13 mm in diameter was identified by the resistive grid as a rectangular region of 14 mm × 13 mm, with a location identification error of about 0.3%. Under multiple-impact conditions, the false positive results from the resistive grid were effectively eliminated by correlating them with the coordinates identified by the AE monitoring method. The findings demonstrate that the proposed integrated method can accurately acquire the location and size of impact damage on spacecraft structures, offering a feasible technical approach for on-orbit structural health monitoring.