Damage monitoring is of great concern to manufacturers as well as maintenance personnel for significantly improving safety and reliability of aircrafts. Delamination and corrosion are among the most interested types of damage which the industries want to monitor for composites and metals correspondingly. In plate-like structures, the aforementioned damage can all practically be treated as 2-dimensional damage. Many progresses have been made on monitoring the location of the damage; however, to monitor the size of the damage is still very challenging. It is known from dynamic theory that elastic waves will be scattered and reflected at the interface of two different media. Thus scattered and reflected waves will be generated at the boundaries of the damage. By analyzing these scattered and reflected waves, the boundaries of the damage can be determined, then, not only the location, but also the size of 2-dimensional damage can be given. In this study, to get as exact monitoring results as possible, two types of locating curves are used: one type acquired by pitch-catch mode and the other type by pulseecho mode. By taking the inner most locating curves, the boundaries of the damage can be given. Experimental results showed that the size of ahole damage can be monitored quite well by the envelop locating curves method.

Date Published: 17 April 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8695, Health Monitoring of Structural and Biological Systems 2013, 86951C (17 April 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2009580

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8695:
Health Monitoring of Structural and Biological Systems 2013
Tribikram Kundu, Editor(s)