Polyvinylidene fluoride piezoelectric yarn for real-time damage monitoring of advanced 3D textile composites

Real-time online damage monitoring is essential and critical to the safe service of the advanced fibers reinforced composites. This paper firstly reports a piezoelectric yarn sensor based on electrospinning and 2D braiding technology, to monitor advanced 3D textile composites, which can generate a voltage of about 1 V and sustain long-term cycles at high frequency of 4 Hz. The polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric yarn is embedded into 3D orthogonal composites to realize the online health monitoring of advanced 3D textile composites through the three-point bending test. Following the bending fatigue and modal tests, the PVDF piezoelectric yarn sensor proposed in this work enables long-term, low-frequency, high-frequency, and stable monitoring, thus showing good potential and wide application in damage monitoring as a piezoelectric sensor in composites. •The damage of 3D textile composites is firstly monitored by piezoelectric yarns.•The piezoelectric yarn can monitor different damages of 3D textile composites.•The piezoelectric yarn enables long-term, low-frequency, and stable monitoring.