Active damage localization technique based on energy propagation of Lamb waves

An active damage detection technique is introduced to locate damage in an isotropic plate using Lamb waves. This technique uses a time-domain energy model of Lamb waves in plates that the wave amplitude inversely decays with the propagation distance along a ray direction. Accordingly the damage localization is formulated as a least-squares problem to minimize an error function between the model and the measured data. An active sensing system with integrated actuators/sensors is controlled to excite/receive A(0) mode of Lamb waves in the plate. Scattered wave signals from the damage can be obtained by subtracting the baseline signal of the undamaged plate from the recorded signal of the damaged plate. In the experimental study, after collecting the scattered wave signals, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is employed to extract the first scattered wave pack from the damage, then an iterative method is derived to solve the least-squares problem for locating the damage. Since this method does not rely on time-of-flight but wave energy measurement, it is more robust, reliable, and noise-tolerant. Both numerical and experimental examples are performed to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the method, and the results demonstrate that the estimated damage position stably converges to the targeted damage.