Ultrasonic Arrays for Sensing and Beamforming of Lamb Waves

Sammanfattning: Non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques are critical to ensure integrity and safety of engineered structures. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is considered as the next step in the field enabling continuous monitoring of structures.The first part of the thesis concerns NDT and SHM using guided waves in plates, or Lamb waves, to perform imaging of plate structures. The imaging is performed using a fixed active array setup covering a larger area of a plate. Current methods are based on conventional beamforming techniques that do not efficiently exploit the available data from the small arrays used for the purpose. In this thesis an adaptive signal processing approach based on the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) method is proposed to mitigate issues related to guided waves, such as dispersion and the presence of multiple propagating modes. Other benefits of the method include a significant increase in resolution. Simulation and experimental results show that the method outperforms current standard processing techniques.The second part of the thesis addresses transducer design issues for resonant ultrasound inspections. Resonant ultrasound methods utilize the shape and frequency of the object's natural modes of vibration to detect anomalies. The method considered in the thesis uses transducers that are acoustically coupled to the inspected structures. Changes in the transducer's electrical impedance are used to detect defects. The sensitivity that can be expected from such a setup is shown to highly depend on the transducer resonance frequency, as well as the working frequency of the instrument. Through simulations and a theoretical argumentation, optimal conditions to achieve high sensitivity are given.