An integrated structural health monitoring system based on Lamb waves

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has the potential of providing significant economic benefits through predictive maintenance and identification of damages in structures at an early stage. In particular, active SHM systems based on Lamb wave propagation can be applied to structures of different materials, including composites. In this paper, a portable and totally autonomous SHM system which excites and detects Lamb waves is proposed. Detected signals are processed in-situ and in real time in order to estimate the damage location. The result is then communicated wirelessly to the user, in the form of a spatial map of the damage probability distribution.