A rapid and velocity-independent damage localization approach for ultrasonic structural health monitoring

This paper presents a novel damage localization approach for active ultrasonic structural health monitoring. The formalism considers triplets of two actuators and one sensor in a spatially distributed transducer network. Depending on time-of-flight measurements that are automatically conducted on differential signals, the defect position in isotropic and quasi-isotropic plates is located very rapidly without the wave velocity information. This is particularly beneficial when the wave speed cannot be obtained because of an unknown stacking sequence of the laminate. Results are shown for different point-like defects on isotropic and quasi-isotropic structures for which the processing time is less than 1 s on a standard computer.