The Effect of Piezoelectric Fiber Rosette Configurations on Lamb Wave Direction Detection for Damage Localization

Abstract

Piezoelectric fiber rosettes respond to the directivity characteristics of Lamb waves, and therefore, are useful in detecting the Lamb wave propagation direction. Considering material damage as a secondary wave source, two piezoelectric fiber rosettes are arranged to measure the scattered wave propagation directions for damage localization. The influences of various rosette configurations, i.e., 45°-rectangular, 135°-rectangular, 60°-delta, and 120°-delta, on the estimation accuracy of the propagation direction are investigated in this paper. The response of the piezoelectric fiber to the $A_0$ mode Lamb wave under narrowband tone-burst excitation is theoretically derived. Experimental tests and piezoelectric coupling simulations are performed to obtain the Lamb wave signal of each fiber. The matching pursuit (MP) algorithm is applied to extract the weak damage-related wave packet by using Hann-windowed narrowband excitation as an atom. The Lamb wave propagation directions are estimated based on the error function. The accuracies of the directions with 4 types of rosette configurations are compared, and their error sources are discussed. The results show that the accuracy of the 135°-rectangular configuration is relatively satisfactory, and the errors depend on the size and location of each fiber in the rosette. The proposed damage localization method is validated by experimental tests. The predicted locations are close to the actual damage location. The research results are significant for piezoelectric fiber rosette design and optimization and damage location without wave speed or time-of-flight information in complex or irregular structures.