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With capability of achieving structural state awareness and facilitating preventative maintenance schemes, the global market of structural health monitoring (SHM) is growing at an expected compound annual growth rate of 14.5 percent from 2020 to 2027. From a long run, the increasing adoption of internet of things (IoT) and digital twins are transforming the physical world in a wider range into virtual representations. This will sustain the technical advancement and market growth of SHM in the future. As the most commonly applied non-destructive testing method without radioactive hazard, the application of ultrasonic technology in SHM is currently far from the same level of popularity. The important reasons include the bulky size and mass of ultrasonic transducers, and inconsistency in acoustic coupling between the host structure and individual transducers usually manually installed. To overcome the challenges, our group has developed piezoelectric polymer coatings and lead-free piezoelectric ceramic coatings, with processing scalability over large area and conformability on curved surface. Low profile ultrasonic transducers and transducer array have been designed and produced in-situ on the host structure using the piezoelectric coatings, such as via direct-write process. In collaboration with our research and industry collaborators, guided wave-based ultrasonic SHM functions are being demonstrated on planar and tubular structures, including detections of various defects from presence of cracks to plastic deformation. The features and opportunities of these piezoelectric coating transducers in-situ produced for ultrasonic SHM will be discussed.
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