<title>Active health system based on wavelet transform analysis of diffracted Lamb waves</title>

Abstract

In composite materials, delaminations are discontinuities producing mode conversion processes generating various out-going modes. The Discrete Wavelet Transform allows isolating various propagation modes and extracting them in order to measure the time delay between the arrivals of the main burst and a specific out-going mode, for various propagation paths. This process permits, with a good accuracy, to localize a damage and to estimate its extension. An active health monitoring system composed of integrated disc-shaped, 100 (mu) m-thick and 5 mm-dia PZT transducers working sequentially as actuators and receives is presented. The diagnostic is based on multiresolution process by wavelet transform applied on recorded Lamb wave signals obtained before and after damage. The robustness and portability of this technique is demonstrated by the fact that, after validation in our laboratory it was successfully applied to data coming from an experiment conducted in an other Laboratory using its own Health Monitoring system.