STRUCTURAL DIAGNOSTICS OF BALLISTIC-LIKE DAMAGE VARIATION VIA WAVE PROPAGATION-BASED FILTERING TECHNIQUES.

This paper evaluates the ability of wave filtering techniques to identify and quantify defect variations in structures. The proposed techniques are based on the evaluation of reflection, transmission, and conversion of different Lamb wave modes in the presence of damages and of the spatial evaluation of their phases. The structure is excited by an enhanced fundamental symmetric mode, and the damage is initially located by evaluating the phase gradient of the converted Lamb mode. The process relies on mode separation and incident-wave removal procedures implemented in the frequency/wavenumber domain. Such procedures rely on the spatial integration of wave amplitudes in contrast to point-wise estimation previously proposed in the literature, as a way to reduce the effect of noise. Numerical and experimental parametric studies are conducted, where the specific damage geometry is varied to represent common external ballistic impact, from a sharp rectangular notch to a semi-circular depression. Likewise, the techniques are demonstrated on experimental data obtained from a Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometer setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]