Waveform covariance imaging for Lamb wave phased array

The amplitude and the phase information are both important for damage localization in Lamb wave–based structural health monitoring and non-destructive testing. Most previous studies in Lamb wave imaging are only based on either the amplitude or phase of the signal at the time of flight. In this study, a post-processing technique for Lamb wave phased array imaging is proposed for isotropic plates, which simultaneously utilizes both the amplitude and phase information within a small neighborhood centered at the time of flight. In the proposed imaging algorithm, a modified virtual time reversal is firstly implemented to compensate for dispersion and the amplitude decrease caused by wave diffusion. Then the waveform covariance between any two processed wave packets, which contains information of both amplitude and phase, is used as the indicator of the presence of damage. Finally, adaptive weights based on minimum variance are introduced to weight and sum the waveform covariance for damage imaging. Based on a uniform circular array, experimental results on an aluminum plate with three defects verify that the proposed algorithm is capable of localizing multiple defects, suppressing background noise and main lobe width.