Ultrasonic Guided Wave Tomography for Damage Detection in Harsh Environment

Abstract

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.