Ultrasonic Guided Wave Signal Based Nondestructive Testing of a Bonded Composite Structure Using Piezoelectric Transducers

Abstract

This paper presents ultrasonic guided wave (UGW) propagation-based nondestructive testing (NDT) of an adhesively bonded composite structure (ACS). In the process, a series of scanning laser Doppler vibrometry (SLDV)-based laboratory experiments and time-domain spectral element method (SEM)-based numerical simulations were carried out on an ACS with barely visible impact damage (BVID) and a hole. A good agreement was observed between the numerical and experimental UGW signals in the cases studied. Finally, a full-field and elliptical signal processing method-based NDT strategy was proposed that uses differential damage features of the registered UGW signals to identify different types of BVIDs in the ACS.