Simulation assisted guided wave structural health monitoring of aerospace structures

Abstract

This work describes the comparison of laboratory guided wave (GW) structural health monitoring (SHM) data and simulated GW data for an aluminum fuselage section undergoing testing at the FAA. The test set up consists of 12 piezoelectric wafer transducers which are each actuated individually. Data is then collected from each non-actuated sensor. The structure tested was an aluminum fuselage panel and the structure simulated was two bays of that panel. The simulations were completed using a custom code implementing the elastodynamic finite integration technique to model GW SHM of metals. The goal of the simulation is not only to provide a deeper understanding of real-world phenomena, but also to enable a cost-effective and feasible route to studying a large number of defect detection scenarios. Modeling the physics of GW SHM systems provides a path for understanding system dependencies, capabilities and limitations for different damage detection scenarios. This work describes the method for simulating the GW data and the method for collecting GW data in the laboratory setting. We also describe initial results comparing the data sets (experimental and simulation) for a single defect scenario and the resulting conclusions about the use of simulations for GW SHM system validation.