Detection of Surface Breaking Cracks Filled With Solid Impurities Using a Baseline-Free NEWS-TR Method

The use of piezoceramic transducers for cracks identification via guided wave has attracted significant attention recently. Most studies assume that the medium in surface breaking cracks is only air. However, it is common that such cracks are filled with impurities (e.g. dust, grease) due to its exposure to the operational environment. The impurities may affect the propagation of the ultrasonic guided wave and hence it is of practical interest to develop detection methods for surface breaking cracks filled with impurities. This work investigates the possible effect of contact acoustic nonlinearity (CAN) on detecting surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities. A baseline-free method is proposed to detect surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities using the nonlinear elastic wave spectroscopy (NEWS) as a pre-treatment of time-reversal (TR). This method involves three key issues: selecting low-frequency swept signal modulated by Hanning window as an excitation signal, comparing the initial filtered response with the nonlinear time reversal response to determine the nonlinear feature related to such cracks, and determining the recommended low cut-off frequency to extract such nonlinear feature. The feasibility of the proposed method is experimentally and numerically verified using aluminum beams with surface breaking cracks. Results show that due to the existence of solid impurities, the crack interacts with low-frequency ultrasonic waves, which leads to nonlinear components in the response signal. It also indicates that after the time-reversal processing, the shifting of the maximum peak frequency from the second harmonic range to the third harmonic range can be used as a damage-sensitive nonlinear feature for detecting such cracks. The proposed method provides a promising way to identify surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities without reference signal.