A Lamb wave signal reconstruction method for high-resolution damage imaging

Abstract

In Lamb wave-based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), a high-enough spatial resolution is highly required for Lamb wave signals to ensure the resolution and accuracy of damage detection. However, besides the dispersion characteristic, the signal spatial resolution is also largely restricted by the space duration of excitation waveforms, i.e., the Initial Spatial Resolution (ISR) for the signals before travelling. To resolve the problem of inferior signal spatial resolution of Lamb waves, a Lamb Wave Signal Reconstruction (LWSR) method is presented and applied for high-resolution damage imaging in this paper. In LWSR, not only a new linearly-dispersive signal is reconstructed from an original Lamb wave signal, but also the group velocity at the central frequency is sufficiently decreased. Then, both dispersion compensation and ISR improvement can be realized to achieve a satisfying signal spatial resolution. After the frequency domain sensing model and spatial resolution of Lamb wave signals are firstly analyzed, the basic idea and numerical realization of LWSR are discussed. Numerical simulations are also implemented to preliminarily validate LWSR. Subsequently, LWSR-based high-resolution damage imaging is developed. An experiment of adjacent multiple damage identification is finally conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of LWSR and LWSR-based imaging methods.