Passive structural health monitoring of a vibrating shell using data-based matched field processing

Abstract

This study presents experimental results on passive structural health monitoring of a vibrating elastic structure for defect localization. The approach is based on matched field processing (MFP), which requires a model of the pristine structure. An MFP methodology for localizing a defect in a shell equipped with vibration sensors was developed and numerically demonstrated in [JASA EL 2, 025601 (2022)]. This paper further extends this study to experimental implementation of this MFP methodology without requiring full knowledge of the structure parameters and the boundary conditions of the pristine structure. The method is tested on experimental data for localizing a defect on a rectangular steel plate with non-perfectly, fixed boundary conditions.