Adhesive bonding has been shown to successfully address some of the main problems with traditional fasteners, such as the reduction of the overall weight and a more uniformly distributed stress state. However, due to the unpredictability of failure of adhesive bonds, their use is not widely accepted in the aerospace industry. Unlike traditional fastening methods, it is difficult to inspect the health of an adhesive joint once it has been cured. For adhesive bonding to be widely accepted and implemented, there must be a better understanding of the fracture mechanism of the adhesive joints, as well as a way to monitor the health of the bonds non-destructively. Therefore, in-field structural health monitoring is an important tool to ensure optimal condition of the bond is present during its lifetime. This project focuses on the advancement of a non-invasive field instrument for evaluation of the health of the adhesive joints. The tool developed is based on a B-H looper system where coils are arranged into a noise-cancellation configuration to measure the magnetic susceptibility of the samples with a lock-in amplifier. The B-H looper system can evaluate the state of damage in an adhesive bond by detecting changes in surface charge density at the molecular level of an epoxy-based adhesive doped with magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs). Epoxy-based adhesive samples were doped with MENs and then scanned using the B-H looper system. To evaluate the health of the adhesive joint, micro-indentation and tensile tests were performed on MENs-doped adhesive samples to understand the relationship between mechanical damage and magnetic signal. Correlations between magnetic signatures and mechanical damage were minimally observed, thus future studies will focus on refining the procedure and damaging methodology.
