Probability-Based Diagnostic Imaging of Fatigue Damage in Carbon Fiber Composites Using Sparse Representation of Lamb Waves

Abstract

Carbon fiber composites are commonly used in aerospace and other fields due to their excellent properties, and fatigue damage will occur in the process of service. Damage imaging can be performed using damage probability imaging methods to obtain the fatigue damage condition of carbon fiber composites. At present, the damage factor commonly used in the damage probability imaging algorithm has low contrast and poor anti-noise performance, which leads to artifacts in the imaging and misjudgment of the damaged area. Therefore, this paper proposes a fatigue damage probability imaging method for carbon fiber composite materials based on the sparse representation of Lamb wave signals. Based on constructing the Lamb wave dictionary, a fast block sparse Bayesian learning algorithm is used to represent the Lamb wave signals sparsely, and the definition of Lamb wave sparse representing the damage factor calculates the damage probability of the monitoring area and then images the fatigue damage of the carbon fiber composite materials. The imaging research was carried out using the fatigue monitoring experiment data of NASA’s carbon fiber composite materials. The results show that the proposed damage factor can clearly distinguish the damaged area from the undamaged area and has strong noise immunity. Compared with the energy damage factor and the cross-correlation damage factor, the error percentages are reduced by at least 58.63%, 28.11%, and 8.43% for signal-to-noise ratios of 6 dB, 3 dB, and 0.1 dB, respectively, after adding noise to the signal. The results can more accurately reflect the real location and area of fatigue damage in carbon fiber composites.