Damage Localization in Composite Structures Using a Guided Waves Based Multi-Parameter Approach

Abstract

Aerospace vehicles are demanded to withstand harsh conditions with a low weight impact. Composites have been increasingly adopted to meet such performances but they are affected by sudden and barely visible failures when subjected to low velocity impacts. The design criteria and the maintenance tasks in a damage tolerant approach are unavoidably compromised. Structural Health Monitoring is expected to avoid typical accommodations employed during design and lifetime management by achieving a cost-effective and on condition maintenance. This paper describes the use of guided ultrasonic waves excited and sensed by permanently attached piezoelectric transducers for detection and localization of unforeseen and hidden flaws in composite structures. A composite stiffened structures designed for real scale components is investigated to test a multi-parameter detection technique capable of predicting different wave features affected by hidden failures to detect any possible change in the structure. Usually, propagation behavior is exploited to detect changes in the waveguide focusing on the analysis of an intrinsic feature of the propagating wave. Numerical simulations and measurements carried out on a real-scale aircraft structure demonstrate that increasing the observed characteristics improves the result making efficient the diagnosis. Furthermore, it is shown that accounting a multi-parameter analysis of ultrasonic data enhances the localization reliability making use of the same reconstruction algorithm with data fusion approach while facing with different kind of damages.

Lamb-Wave-Based Multistage Damage Detection Method Using an Active PZT Sensor Network for Large Structures

“…It resulted in many images obtained for the same structural state which were then fused to improve the damage localization. A multiparameter approach [25] was presented using the reconstruction algorithm which enhanced the damage localization of single detection framework by extracting different features from the propagating wave. Furthermore, there have been Lamb-wave-based baseline-free methods for damage imaging and localization in isotropic plates using wavelet transform, empirical mode decomposition [26], and instantaneous baseline measurement [27] methods.…”

“…In some methods, the feature measured in the second stage is different from the one measured in the first stage (e.g., location of the defect in the first stage and its size in the second stage). Most of the existing NDT methods for damage detection in plate-like structures only focus on identification of the damage position and not its extent/size [10,14,15,22,24,25,30,31,32,33,35,36,37]. The reason is that most of the existing methods detect the damage usually in the form of images, and do not provide accurate quantitative measurements.…”

Tomography of reinforced concrete

“…PC supported structure) was seen in the last example through improvement of 3DPP procedure, alongside least swagger and large scale pore size of 200 and 750 μm, separately . Tomographic features are a multiparameter investigation of ultrasonic information upgrades the limitation dependability utilizing a similar remaking calculation with information combination approach while looking with different damages changed sort of harms …”

Wave Mode Identification of Acoustic Emission Signals Using Phase Analysis

“…Material properties and component geometry can affect the dispersion properties of AE, where the propagating velocity of the extensional and flexural wave modes changes with frequency in thin structures such as aircraft skins [9]. Typically, this relation can be determined analytically for simple plate-like structures; however, these equations rapidly become very complicated with increased geometrical complexity of the structure [10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…This challenge is further compounded with complex geometry and increased wave propagation distance where the effects of reflection, attenuation [17] and dispersion [18] can be pronounced. Furthermore, additional effects include dispersion due to material anisotropy [19], as well as wave mode conversion, where a particular wave mode changes to another; and complexities in the geometry of the structure [11,20].…”