Advanced Signal Processing for Ultrasonic Structural Monitoring of Waveguides, in Bridge Maintenance, Safety Management, Health Monitoring and Informatics

Ultrasonic Guided Waves (UGWs) are a useful tool in those structural health monitoring applications that can benefit from built-in transduction, moderately large inspection ranges and high sensitivity to small flaws. This paper describes a damage detection method, based on wavelet transform and outlier analysis for structural waveguides. The method combines the advantages of UGW inspection with the outcomes of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) that is used for extracting defect-sensitive features that can be combined to perform a multivariate diagnosis of damage. In particular, the DWT is exploited to generate a set of relevant wavelet coefficients to construct a uni-dimensional or multi-dimensional damage index. The damage index is then fed to an outlier analysis to detect anomalous structural states. The general framework presented in this paper is applied to the detection of fatigue cracks in a W6x15 steel beam. The probing hardware consists of Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) materials used for both ultrasound generation and detection at chosen frequency. The effectiveness of the proposed methods for the structural diagnosis of defects that are small compared to the waveguide cross-sectional area is discussed.