An Empirical Study on Transmission Beamforming for Ultrasonic Guided-Wave Based Structural Health Monitoring

The development of reliable structural health monitoring techniques is enabling a healthy transition from preventive to condition-based maintenance, hence leading to safer and more efficient operation of different industries. Ultrasonic guided-wave based beamforming is one of the most promising tech...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Cantero Chinchilla, Sergio, Aranguren Aramendia, Gerardo, Malik, Muhammad Khalid, Echaniz Marañón, Josu, Martín de la Escalera, Federico
Format: article
Publication Date:2020
Country:España
Institution:Universidad del País Vasco
Repository:Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación
OAI Identifier:oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/42451
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10810/42451
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:SHM
structural inspection
ultrasonic guided-waves
transmission beamforming
phased-array
Description
Summary:The development of reliable structural health monitoring techniques is enabling a healthy transition from preventive to condition-based maintenance, hence leading to safer and more efficient operation of different industries. Ultrasonic guided-wave based beamforming is one of the most promising techniques, which supports the monitoring of large thin-walled structures. However, beamforming has been typically applied to the post-processing stage (also known as virtual or receiver beamforming) because transmission or physical beamforming requires complex hardware configurations. This paper introduces an electronic structural health monitoring system that carries out transmission beamforming experiments by simultaneously emitting and receiving ultrasonic guided-waves using several transducers. An empirical characterization of the transmission beamforming technique for monitoring an aluminum plate is provided in this work. The high signal-to-noise ratio and accurate angular precision of the physical signal obtained in the experiments suggest that transmission beamforming can increase the reliability and robustnessof this monitoring technique for large structures and in real-world noisy environments.