Damage detection in plates based on Lamb wavefront shape reconstruction

Abstract

Many of the current studies in the area of damage detection using elastic wave propagation are based on deploying sensor networks with a large number of piezoelectric transducers to detect small-size cracks. A major limitation of these studies is that cracks are usually larger and have different shapes in real cases. Moreover, using a large number of sensing nodes for damage detection is both costly and computationally intensive. The paper proposes a novel elastic wave propagation method for damage detection based on the reconstruction of the shape of the reflected wavefront. The main advantage of the developed approach is that merely three sensors are necessary to localize and estimate the size of the cracks with various sizes and shapes. Several damage cases with different number of piezoelectric transducers and placement have been investigated experimentally. Extensive numerical simulations are performed to benchmark the performance of the proposed method.