Damage Detection and Characterisation in Composites using a Geometric Modification of the RAPID Algorithm

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of aircraft structures, which are manufactured more and more using composite material, is a well-established technique for increasing reliability and reducing maintenance costs. Implementing damage inspection algorithms that run in dedicated electronic systems helps reduce big data processing time with improved results. RAPID (Reconstruction Algorithm for Probabilistic Inspection of Damage) algorithm, developed some years ago, provides a technique to identify and characterize damages both in metallic and composite materials. However, this algorithm sometimes provides inaccurate predictions of the damage location, caused mainly by the influence of path intersection points among transducers, that can mask the current location of damages. This work presents a geometrical modification of standard RAPID algorithm (RAPID-G) that mitigates the influence of the intersection point between sensor paths. The results highlight that the location of damages improves significantly with this modification of the algorithm.