An imaging algorithm for damage detection with dispersion compensation using piezoceramic induced lamb waves

Piezoceramic induced Lamb waves are often used for imaging based damage detection, especially for plate like structures. The dispersion effect of the Lamb waves deteriorates the performance of most of imaging methods, since the waveform of the dispersion signals will spread out. In this paper, an imaging method which can compensate the dispersion is developed. In the proposed method, the phase induced by the propagation distance is compensated firstly. After that, the phase deviation generated by the dispersion effect is compensated. Via the two compensations, the proposed method can derive an accurate location of the target with a clean imaging map. An experiment using a plate like structure with four piezoceramic transducer was conducted. In the experiment, the four piezoceramic sensors were used to obtain the signals of the scatterer that simulated the damage on an aluminum plate. The experimental results show that since the dispersion effect is compensated, the target's image based on the proposed method is about 10 cm × 14 cm, which is about a quarter of that of using the back-projection imaging method.