A novel multi-site damage localization method based on near-field signal subspace fitting using uniform linear sensor array

Abstract

Damage diagnose imaging methods based on guided waves have been widely developed to depict the position and area of damage in structural health monitoring (SHM). Among them, compact sensor array based imaging methods have been gradually applied with high accuracy, such as phased array imaging, spatial filter imaging, multiple signal classification imaging and so on. However, when the multi-site damage appears nearly, the performance of these methods usually degrades. On one hand, limited to the array aperture, traditional methods cannot distinguish adjacent damage sites. On another hand, some subspace decomposition based methods also fail, suffering from the correlation between scattered array signals from different damage sites. To realize localization of multi-site damage, a novel near-field signal subspace fitting based multi-site damage localization method is proposed in this paper. This method constructs the cost function, which describe the equivalence relation between the signal subspace and array manifold matrix. Then localization of multi-site damage could be realized through multidimensional search for the optimization of cost function. The proposed method is verified on the aluminum panel with 3 damage sites. Experimental results show that the proposed method can realize multi-site damage localization with the angle errors less than 4° and the distance errors less than 35 mm.