Improved Damage Mapping with Hyperbola Approach for Guided Waves Based Structural Health Monitoring Using Fiber Bragg Grating sensors

Abstract Ultrasonic guided waves (GW) are commonly used in aerospace, civil, and mechanical industries for inspecting the health of a structure non-destructively. Traditionally the piezoelectric based actuators and sensors have been used for the actuation and sensing of GW. But the use of fiber Bragg grating sensors (FBG) is on the increase due to the unique opportunities offered by these sensors. There are several techniques that are used for damage mapping. The most commonly used in reflection based assessment domain are the ellipse based and hyperbola based approaches. Hyperbola approach is based on the time difference of arrival (TDOA). The time difference in the arrival time for two sensors with a common actuator is used for obtaining the hyperbola. The superposition of these hyperbolas for all possible actuator and sensor pairs may be used for damage localization. In this paper a new improved hyperbola approach for damage mapping is proposed by combining it with the ellipse based approach. In order to limit the number of computations a binary variable is introduced to check if the pixel fulfils the hyperbola and ellipse conditions. So only the regions of the structure which fulfil both conditions are mapped. This limits the number of hyperbolas which are identified as possible damage and improves the damage localization. The methodology is employed on a simple aluminium plate with acoustically FBG sensors. The performance of the new approach is compared with existing methods. The results indicate that indeed the improved hyperbola approach improves the localization. Also the computational load is reduced allowing more real time damage mapping.