Health Monitoring of Aluminum Weldings with the Surface Response to Excitation (SuRE) Approach

Abstract : Recently, the impedance and Lamb wave methods were used to evaluate the integrity of welded structures. Both approaches were proven to detect defects at the other side of the welded butt joints. In this paper, the Surface Response to Excitation (SuRE) approach was used and compared with the other two methods for evaluating the integrity of the welded structures. The SuRE approach was found to be an effective structural health monitoring (SHM) tool for inspection of welded structures while yielding results similar to the other two methods. Overall, the SuRE approach is very similar to the impedance method, with the main difference being the necessity of using two transducers instead of one self-sensing actuator.