Localization of Damages in Plain And Riveted Aluminium Specimens using Lamb Waves

Abstract

The Lamb wave-based localization of damage is presented here separately for the plain and riveted aluminium (Al) specimens. The first part of this paper deals with the experimental damage localization of the plain Al specimen using Lamb waves and four piezoelectric wafer (PW) transducers. The PW transducers mounted onto the specimen in a collocated way are used to actuate and sense Lamb waves. The responses are obtained for both the pristine and damaged states of the Al specimen. The signal processing is carried out on the residual response using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), and time of arrival (TOA) data is obtained for each collocated actuator-sensor pair. The TOA data of the wave reflected from the damage is used in the two arrival time difference and astroid algorithms to locate the damage in an enclosed area. The genetic optimization (GO) method is used to further refine the location of damage within the enclosed area obtained using astroid algorithm. The second part of the paper deals with the localization of a faulty rivet in a riveted specimen. The responses are obtained in the cases of both healthy and faulty riveted specimens. The presence of a faulty rivet is indicated by the inflation in amplitude of the second harmonic. A new algorithm is therefore proposed by the authors to localize the faulty rivet, using the spectral content information. The results obtained through both the studies manifest the ability of the proposed methods for locating different types of defects and faulty rivets using an array of PW transducers.