Liang Zeng

Excitation Waveform Design for Lamb Wave Pulse Compression

Most ultrasonic guided wave methods focus on tone burst excitation to reduce the effect of dispersion so as to facilitate signal interpretation. However, the resolution of the output cannot attain a very high value because time duration of the excitation waveform cannot be very small. To overcome this limitation, a pulse compression technique is introduced to Lamb wave propagation to achieve a δ-like correlation so as to obtain a high resolution for inspection. Ideal δ-like correlation is impossible as only a finite frequency bandwidth can propagate. The primary purpose of this paper is to design a proper excitation waveform for Lamb wave pulse compression, which shortens the correlation as close as possible to a δ function. To achieve this purpose, the performance of some typical signals is discussed in pulse compression, which include linear chirp (L-Chirp) signal, nonlinear chirp (NLChirp) signal, Barker code (BC), and Golay complementary code (GCC). In addition, how the excitation frequency range influences inspection resolution is investigated. A strategy for the frequency range determination is established subsequently. Finally, an experiment is carried out on an aluminum plate where these typical signals are used as excitations at different frequency ranges. The quantitative comparisons of the pulse compression responses validate the theoretical findings. By utilizing the experimental data, the improvement of pulse compression in resolution compared with tone burst excitation is also validated, and the robustness of the waveform design method to inaccuracies in the dispersion compensation is discussed as well.

High-Resolution Lamb Wave Inspection in Viscoelastic Composite Laminates

Lamb wave inspection is a promising structural health monitoring method for carbon fiber reinforced plastic laminates. The optimal design of the excitation waveform based on Lamb wave pulse compression is an effective way to improve the inspection resolution in elastic plates. However, due to the viscoelastic property of the composite materials, the material damping effect will influence the amplitude response of the output signals; thus, the current design strategy is no longer applicable. The purpose of this paper is to develop an excitation waveform design strategy based on pulse compression to meet the demands of high-resolution Lamb wave inspection in composite materials. Different parameters that affect the design of excitation such as material damping effect, amplitude response, relative frequency bandwidth, and the selection of excitation waveform are considered synthetically. In addition, an excitation waveform design strategy based on the corrected amplitude response is also established to eliminate the effect of material damping and thus achieve better detection resolution. Finally, an experiment was carried out on a quasi-isotropic composite plate. The experimental results validate the robustness of the amplitude response correction method and the effectiveness of the excitation waveform design strategy.

Interference resisting design for guided wave tomography

RAPID (reconstruction algorithm for the probabilistic inspection of damage) is a new promising tomography approach for the detection and monitoring of critical areas in a structure. With the sensors permanently installed on or embedded in structures, changes in effective thickness and material properties caused by structural damage can be detected and mapped to the tomogram. However, in this method, the tomographic feature SDC (signal difference coefficient) captures the overall change of the received ultrasonic signals, which makes it sensitive to environmental factors (e.g. rain, changes in temperature and humidity). As a result, the approach is restricted in the laboratory environment. In this paper, the influence of measurement data length on the SDC and the tomogram are investigated, and a new strategy is established on how to choose the measurement data to obtain good reconstruction by matching the coverage zone of each transmitter–receiver pair with the corresponding affected zone. The proposed method is then applied to identify defects of the specimen in the presence of external sources of interference, such as water droplets and structural variations outside the critical area. The results demonstrate its capability of improved robustness in the presence of external sources of interference.

A Modified Lamb Wave Time-Reversal Method for Health Monitoring of Composite Structures

Because the time reversal operator of Lamb waves varies with frequency in composite structures, the reconstructed signal deviates from the input signal even in undamaged cases. The damage index captures the discrepancy between the two signals without differentiating the effects of time reversal operator from those of damage. This results in the risk of false alarm. To solve this issue, a modified time reversal method (MTRM) is proposed. In this method, the frequency dependence of the time reversal operator is compensated by two steps. First, an amplitude modulation is placed on the input signal, which is related to the excitability, detectability, and attenuation of the Lamb wave mode. Second, the damage index is redefined to measure the deviation between the reconstructed signal and the modulated input signal. This could indicate the presence of damage with better performance. An experimental investigation is then conducted on a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) laminate to illustrate the effectiveness of the MTRM for identifying damage. The results show that the MTRM may provide a promising tool for health monitoring of composite structures.

Amplitude Dispersion Compensation for Damage Detection Using Ultrasonic Guided Waves

Besides the phase and group velocities, the amplitude of guided wave mode is also frequency dependent. This amplitude dispersion also influences the performance of guided wave methods in nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM). In this paper, the effects of amplitude dispersion to the spectrum and waveform of a propagating wave-packet are investigated. It is shown that the amplitude dispersion results in distortion in the spectrum of guided wave response, and thus influences the waveform of the wave-packet. To remove these effects, an amplitude dispersion compensation method is established on the basis of Vold–Kalman filter and Taylor series expansion. The performance of that method is then investigated by experimental examples. The results show that with the application of the amplitude dispersion compensation, the time reversibility could be preserved, which ensures the applicability of the time reversal method for damage detection. Besides, through amplitude dispersion compensation, the testing resolution of guided waves could be improved, so that the structural features located in the close proximity may be separately identified.

Pulse energy evolution for high-resolution Lamb wave inspection

Generally, tone burst excitation methods are used to reduce the effect of dispersion in Lamb wave inspection. In addition, algorithms for dispersion compensation are required to simplify responses, especially in long-range inspection. However, the resolution is always limited by the time duration of tone burst excitation. A pulse energy evolution method is established to overcome this limitation. In this method, a broadband signal with a long time (e.g. a chirp, white noise signal, or a pseudo-random sequence) is used as excitation to actuate Lamb waves. First of all, pulse compression is employed to estimate system impulse response with a high signal-to-noise ratio. Then, dispersion compensation is applied repeatedly with systemically varied compensation distances, obtaining a series of compensated signals. In these signals, amplitude (or energy) evolution associated with the change of compensation distance is utilized to estimate the actual propagation distance of the interested wave packet. Finally, the defect position is detected by an imaging algorithm. Several experiments are given to validate the proposed method.

High-resolution damage detection based on local signal difference coefficient model

Probability reconstruction algorithm is a new promising tomography approach for the detection and monitoring of critical areas in a structure. In this algorithm, the correlation calculation is performed by capturing interrogation signals in different conditions to generate tomographic feature (i.e. signal difference coefficient) and linking the value with the presence of the potential defect. However, the way of signal difference coefficient in depicting defect is rough to some extent. Essentially, signal difference coefficient merely suggests how close the defect is away from the sensing path. The major reason is that the global signal is directly adopted without considering local information, which is equivalent to ignoring the fact that the existence of the defect always changes local signal rather than the global one. Under this limitation, signal difference coefficient restricts the resolution of the image. A new signal-processing technique is established to exploit the interrogation signal to improve the imaging performance in this article, which extracts local Lamb wave signal, uses local signal difference coefficient as a new input feature, and then employs it in probability reconstruction algorithm for damage identification. The efficiency of the proposed method is validated by some experiments.

A reshaped excitation regenerating and mapping method for waveform correction in Lamb waves dispersion compensation

Dispersion effect of Lamb wave will cause wave-packets to spread out in space and time, making received signals hard to be interpreted. Though the conventional dispersion compensation method can restrain dispersion effect, waveform deformation still remains in the compensated results. To eliminate dispersion effect completely, a reshaped excitation dispersion compensation method is proposed in this paper. The method compensates the dispersed signal to the same shape as the original excitation by generating a reshaped excitation and then mapping the received signal from time domain to distance domain. Simulations and experiments are conducted for the validation of the waveform correction of the reshaped excitation dispersion compensation method. Applied in the traditional delay-and-sum algorithm, the new dispersion compensation method can effectively enhance the resolution of the damage imaging.

Minimum variance imaging based on correlation analysis of Lamb wave signals

In Lamb wave imaging, MVDR (minimum variance distortionless response) is a promising approach for the detection and monitoring of large areas with sparse transducer network. Previous studies in MVDR use signal amplitude as the input damage feature, and the imaging performance is closely related to the evaluation accuracy of the scattering characteristic. However, scattering characteristic is highly dependent on damage parameters (e.g. type, orientation and size), which are unknown beforehand. The evaluation error can degrade imaging performance severely. In this study, a more reliable damage feature, LSCC (local signal correlation coefficient), is established to replace signal amplitude. In comparison with signal amplitude, one attractive feature of LSCC is its independence of damage parameters. Therefore, LSCC model in the transducer network could be accurately evaluated, the imaging performance is improved subsequently. Both theoretical analysis and experimental investigation are given to validate the effectiveness of the LSCC-based MVDR algorithm in improving imaging performance.

Ultrasonic Guided Wave Tomography for Damage Detection in Harsh Environment

Guided wave tomography is an attractive tool for the detection and monitoring of the critical area in a structure. Using signal difference coefficient (SDC) as the tomographic feature, RAPID (Reconstruction Algorithm for the Probabilistic Inspection of Damage) is an effective and flexible tomography algorithm. In this algorithm, signal changes are exclusively attributed to the structural variation. However, external environment factors like water loading or oil loading also change signals significantly. The presence of anti-symmetric mode with a predominant out of plane displacement makes it very sensitive to these interferences and leads to false alarms. In this paper, Lamb wave is excited in the low-frequency domain, where only the fundamental modes A0 and S0 exist. The significant difference in group velocity between the two modes makes it possible to separate them in time domain. A new method is proposed to extract pure S0 mode signal as valid measurement data to improve the algorithm in addressing false alarm caused by water loading. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the improved algorithm has the capability of providing accurate identification of damage in the presence of water loading.