Strategies for Guided Wave Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

Guided wave structural health monitoring has the potential to detect damage anywhere in a structure using a relatively sparse array of distributed sensors. The success of the approach is dependent on the suppression of signals from benign structural features using reference signal subtraction. In this paper the sensitivity of the reference signal subtraction approach in the presence of ambient temperature changes is quantified and two sensing modalities compared. Two methods of performing the subtraction and their consequences are also investigated.