STRATOSPHERE Main Technical Achievements M36

Stratosphere SA, is in the final phase to test and validate its 16 electrodes Electric Impedance Tomography (EIT) equipment. Some tests are being carry out with carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) with graphene oxide mixed on the matrix developed in the project, and commercial available CFRP’s.

The objective is to have an integrated platform with hardware to acquire and generate the electric signals, software to control all the steps, simulation and optimization in the same packet. It is possible to read a 2D geometry from a CAD file and make all the analysis with simulation and compare the results with a real structure with electrodes bonded on it and the signal’s generated and read by the hardware developed to validate all the concept. Some useful tools are incorporated, like a virtual electrode position software to select the best points to put the electrodes using a simulated environment. A signal integrity tool was developed to verify the quality of the measurements took during the readings with the hardware.

The software tool gives an image with the absolute or relative conductivity of the measured sample, with different algorithms to detect damage on its interior.

This development was start at the beginning of the Smartfan project, with several improvements during the duration of the task, starting with 8 electrodes version to have 16 electrodes actually with several solvers to predict the electric conductivity.

Actually the EIT equipment is in a final phase with some cases to validate the algorithms and the electronic hardware to achieve TRL6.

This work was carried out by the stratosphere engineers: Nelson Ferreira and Christophe Fernandes.

This task is included in the work done in Task 3.3.1: Thermoset-based smart CFRP.