Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is vital in ensuring the structural integrity of critical components utilized in the aerospace, civil and mechanical industries. The development of SHM has a direct impact on public safety, primarily because it is beneficial in identifying early signs of critical failure and is related to reduced downtime and life extension of aging components and structures. Non-destructive testing and evaluation systems are often a crucial part of SHM applications. However, no single monitoring technique has been capable of performing complete structural evaluation due to several inherent challenges including unpredictable environmental and loading conditions, limitations of the techniques themselves, lack of an adequately dense sensing network. 

A team of Drexel researchers have now overcome these challenges, by developing an NDT&E system that integrates Digital Image Correlation (DIC) and Acoustic Emission (AE). When sensing changes in material and or structural integrity, the AE constituent of the novel Acoustic-Optical Sensing System (AOSS) will trigger activation of DIC constituent cameras along with a real-time synchronized data collection and fusion process. This process enables a cross-validated evaluation of material and/or structural integrity which increases reliability of the measurements recorded by each of the two systems independently.