A two-stage approach for quantitative damage imaging in metallic plates using Lamb waves

This paper proposes a two-stage imaging approach for quantitative inspection of damages in metallic plates using the fundamental anti-symmetric mode of ($A_0$) Lamb wave. The proposed approach employs a number of transducers to transmit and receive $A_0$ Lamb wave pulses, and hence, to sequentially scan the plate structures before and after the presence of damage. The approach is applied to image the corrosion damages, which are simplified as a reduction of plate thickness in this study. In stage-one of the proposed approach a damage location image is reconstructed by analyzing the cross-correlation of the wavelet coefficient calculated from the excitation pulse and scattered wave signals for each transducer pairs to determine the damage location. In stage-two the Lamb wave diffraction tomography is then used to reconstruct a thickness reduction image for evaluating the size and depth of the damage. Finite element simulations are carried out to provide a comprehensive verification of the proposed imaging approach. A number of numerical case studies considering a circular transducer network with eight transducers are used to identify the damages with different locations, sizes and thicknesses. The results show that the proposed methodology is able to accurately identify the damage locations with inaccuracy of the order of few millimeters of a circular inspection area of $100mm^2$ and provide a reasonable estimation of the size and depth of the damages.