A guided ultrasonic imaging approach in isotropic plate structures using edge reflections

This paper presents an imaging technique to locate damage in plate-like structures by permanently attached piezoelectric transducers (PZT) capable to generate and receive guided ultrasonic waves. The technique is based on a model capable of predicting envelope of scattered waves. Correlations between the estimated scattered waves and experimental data are used for image reconstruction. The approach is validated on an aluminum plate and results are compared with two common imaging algorithms, that is, Delay and Sum (DS) and Minimum Variance (MV). Damage is simulated by placing two magnets on sides of the plate. It is shown that the inclusion of Lamb wave reflections improves the localization accuracy while making use of fewer number of sensors possible.

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