Estimating ultrasonic time of flight using envelope and quasi maximum likelihood method for damage detection and assessment

Time of flight (TOF) is widely used to locate and size faults in ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation (NDE). In this paper, we propose a novel model-based method for ultrasonic echo parameter estimation. The ultrasonic signal is assumed to be composed of an unknown number of Gaussian echoes corrupted by white Gaussian noise. Firstly, the Hilbert transform is used to extract the envelope of the signal. It is shown that the parameter estimation of the signal is improved by using the envelope. To estimate the parameters of the envelope of the signal, quasi maximum likelihood method is used. The number of echoes is estimated using consistent Akaike information criterion. Two measures are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method: (a) probability of detection of backscattered echoes and (b) the error of estimated time of flights. The proposed method is then compared to the cross-correlation method and the maximum likelihood method which uses the original signal. Simulated and experimental signals are used to evaluate the performance of each method. Both experimental and simulated results show that the proposed method can improve the parameter estimation which ultimately enhances the damage detection and assessment. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.