Efficient baseline gathering and damage detection in guided wave structural health monitoring

Abstract

Guided wave structural health monitoring (SHM) has been proposed as a technique to allow permanently attached sensors to provide information about the state of a structure. Typical approaches rely on gathering information about the baseline state of the structure and using this data with subtraction to highlight changes to the system. This relies on the baseline data accurately representing the conditions that the system will experience. In reality this is difficult to ensure and may result in either large periods out of service or poor performance. In addition the size of the baseline set can become prohibitively large. This paper describes an alternative approach that produces an efficient continuously evolving baseline. The paper considers how damage detection performance can be characterized within this framework and presents a series of metrics to do this. The result is a new way of considering the baseline problem with practical applications to the long term inspection of structures.