Guided waves for monitoring of plate structures with linear cracks of variable length

Damage occurring at the work of plate structures may grow to a considerable size. The joint action – the detection of a defect at the earliest possible stage, the monitoring of its growth and the determination of its critical size in the context of structural reliability allows optimizing the cost of the maintenance and repair of structural elements. Thus the development of monitoring systems for permanent observation of fault evolution is of great importance among civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering communities. This paper focuses on a diagnostic system dedicated for plate structures with a variable length linear crack using the guided wave-based technique and a novel ellipse-based binary damage imaging algorithm. The emphasis is put on the relationship between the configuration of embedded piezoelectric transducers and the extent of a defect possible to identify. Numerical and experimental results show that the proposed diagnostic system has a great potential for the implementation in monitoring systems dedicated for the evaluation of damage growth.