A novel physics-based temperature compensation model for structural health monitoring using ultrasonic guided waves

This article investigates the role of ambient temperature in causing changes to the structural wave propagation, as sensed by piezoelectric transducers, in a newer perspective. A novel approach is proposed to compensate the influence of temperature on piezo-sensor response using both analytical models and numerical simulations. Parametric studies using numerical simulations for plates with surface-mounted piezoelectric transducers establish linear functional relationship between change in sensor signals and specific combination of material properties, within certain temperature range. A numerical temperature compensation model is developed based on this functional relationship to reconstruct piezo-sensor signals at elevated temperatures. Matching pursuit–based signal analysis and reconstruction schemes are used in this study. Practical efficacy of the compensation model is tested for metallic structures with both simple and complex geometries. Model-based reconstruction of first wave packets in the sensor signals is found to match quite well with the experimental measurements. Performance of the proposed compensation model is also found to be at par with the existing state-of-art temperature compensation methods. A very limited set of baseline sensor data is required to estimate unknown model parameters, making this approach to be efficient and practically useful. The output of the compensation model is also used to obtain an accurate estimate of damage location in a structure under varying ambient temperature environments.