Adaptive dispersion compensation for guided wave imaging

Ultrasonic guided waves offer the promise of fast and reliable methods for interrogating large, plate-like structures. Distributed arrays of permanently attached, inexpensive piezoelectric transducers have thus been proposed as a cost-effective means to excite and measure ultrasonic guided waves for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. Guided wave data recorded from a distributed array of transducers are often analyzed and interpreted through the use of guided wave imaging algorithms, such as conventional delay-and-sum imaging or the more recently applied minimum variance imaging. Both imaging algorithms perform reasonably well using signal envelopes, but can exhibit significant performance improvements when phase information is used. However, the use of phase information inherently requires knowledge of the dispersion relations, which are often not known to a sufficient degree of accuracy for high quality imaging since they are very sensitive to environmental conditions such as temperature, pressure, and loading. This work seeks to perform improved imaging with phase information by leveraging adaptive dispersion estimates obtained from in situ measurements. Experimentally obtained data from a distributed array is used to validate the proposed approach.

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