Thermal Cycling Durability of Bonded PZT Transducers Used for the SHM of Reusable Launch Vehicles

In the context of recent reusable launch vehicles (RLV) developments, the SHM methods could be useful to help fast and economic revalidation of RLVs between launches, provided that the SHM transducers keep their functionality under extreme environmental conditions during flight. This paper focuses on the thermal cycling durability of PZT piezoelectric transducers bonded on a Carbon Fiber Reinforce Polymer (CFRP) composite plate. The temperature cycles are set to be representative of the thermal loadings that the structure of a launcher could experience under a thermal barrier: limited number of cycles (