Enhanced algorithm for damage location on composite material

Abstract

Aircraft structures, which are manufactured increasingly using composite materials, present several difficulties for the location of damages using Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques due to their mechanical properties (anisotropy, wave propagation, stiffness, etc.). In this study, the RAPID (Reconstruction Algorithm for Probabilistic Inspection of Damage) algorithm was used to detect and locate damages in a small surface thermoplastic composite material sample, using Lamb waves generated and recorded with piezoelectric transducers (PZT). Some types of damage cause inaccurate predictions, mainly due to their size and location, in this case, especially when the damage is close to a direct path between transducers, and provides a masked detection. Our new proposal for the enhanced RAPID algorithm solves this issue, by performing a geometrical modification which corrects the elliptical distribution on the intersection points.