A Lamb Wave Based Method for the Assessment of Faults in Aluminium Plates

The location and assessment of the damage severity are important steps in structure health monitoring systems. This paper presents a method for locating and assessing the severity of damages in aluminum plates using a Lamb wave approach through a circular array of sensors and a centered actuator. The signals measured by the sensors were processed using the discrete wavelet transform and Hilbert transform to obtain the envelope of these signals. The location and the damage index were obtained from the analysis of the first Lamb wave package peak. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of this method in damage location and in the assessment of the evolution of its severity.