Probability of Detection Assessment of a Guided Wave Structural Health Monitoring System

This paper summarizes the preliminary findings of a study to generate Probability of detection (PoD) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for a guided wave (GW) Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system. PoD curves are used to access a detector’s performance as a function of damage size or equivalently the backscattered Energy to Noise Ratio (ENR). ROC curves present statistical representations of the reliability of the method for detecting certain size flaws versus their Probability of False Alarms (PFA). To a large extent, generating meaningful versions of these curves involves multiple repetitions of the same experiments while injecting as much realistic variability as possible. Experiments using representative rotorcraft specimens with crack growth in addition to a riveted stiffener are presented. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/332