Image Based Damage Detection Method for Composite Panel With Guided Elastic Wave Technique Part I. Damage Localization Algorithm

In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to estimate the damage location in the composite panel by extracting the elastic wave signal reflected from the damaged area. The guided elastic wave is generated by a piezoelectric actuator and sensed by a piezoelectric sensor. The proposed algorithm adopts a diagnostic approach. It compares the non-damaged signal with the damaged signal, and extract damage information along with sensor network and lamb wave group velocity estimated by signal correlation. However, it is difficult to clearly distinguish the damage location due to the nonlinear properties of lamb wave and complex information composed of various signals. To overcome this difficulty, the cumulative summation feature vector algorithm(CSFV) and a visualization technique are newly proposed in this paper. CSFV algorithm finds the center position of the damage by converting the signals reflected from the damage to the area of distance at which signals reach, and visualization technique is applied that expresses feature vectors by multiplying damage indexes. Experiments are performed for a composite panel and comparative study with the existing algorithms is carried out. From the results, it is confirmed that the damage location can be detected by the proposed algorithm with more reliable accuracy.